
Class _. 
Book . 



COPYRIGHF DEPOSrr 



CATHLAMET 



CATHLAMET 



ON THE 



COLUMBIA 



RECOLLECTIONS OF THE INDIAN PEOPLE AND 

SHORT STORIES OF EARLY PIONEER 

DAYS IN THE VALLEY OF THE 

LOWER COLUMBIA RIVER 



BY 

THOMAS NELSON STRONG 



published by 

The Holly Press, Portland, Oregon 

A. D. 1906 



S^i 



CLASS Ct ^^^^'^ll! 
' ^ cfoPY B. 



Copyright 1906 

BY 

Thomas Nelson Strong 




INTRODUCTION AND DEDICATION 

THE tales told in this little book came to the 
writer in many ways. Some of the scenes 
described he saw himself. Indians in their 
lodges and canoes talked freely to him, a little 
boy. Hudson Bay Factors and French voy- 
ageurs in their declining years had many stories 
to tell, and these were caught up by greedy 
ears. What is here told is but a little of the 
gatherings of many years of wilderness life with 
native hunters a#id exploring parties in the 
Pacific Northwest. They may be in themselves 
of little worth, and yet may help future gener- 
ations of our children to better understand the 
life and atmosphere of a peculiar time, to better 
appreciate the crimson and the gold, and may- 
hap a little of the gray of the morning hour of 
the white man's day on the Pacific Coast. 

As my friend, Newman J. Levinson, Sunday 
editor of the Oregonian, originally instigated the 
publication of these tales, and has given me 
much valuable advice and assistance, this little 
volume is respectfully dedicated to him by the 
author. Thomas Nelson Strong. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

T. Cathlamet 9 

11. The Indian Village 12 

III. Indian Men and Women . . . . 17 

IV. Indian Children and Boys ... 20 
V. The Indian Hunting 24 

VI. The Forest Ways 29 

VII, The Coming and the Going ... 39 

VIII. The Medicine Man 46 

IX. The Sweat House 50 

X. The Sins of the Fathers .... 54 

XL The Broken Tribes 61 

XII. The White Chiefs 66 

XIII. Indian Wives 70 

XIV. Keeping the Peace 76 

XV. Chief Umtux 82 

XVI. Happy Days 94 

XVII. The_Pioneers 99 

XVIII. The Pioneer Mother 107 

XIX. The Red Box Ill 

XX. The End 115 



CATHLAMET 

I. 

CATHLAMET, on the Columbia, was, from 
time immemorial, the center of the Indian 
strength on the lower river. The Indian lin- 
gered longer and the Indian blood is more con- 
spicuous there now than at any other place be- 
tween Portland and the Ocean. Chinook was a 
mud beach, a mere fishing station, but Cathlamet 
was an Indian town before Gray sailed into the 
river or Lewis and Clark passed by on their 
way to the sea. Here at the last gathered and 
passed away the Cathlamets, Wahkiakums, 
Chinooks and Coweliskies. Here Anderson lived 
for a while, and here the Hudson Bay Com- 
pany, having past away, came Birnie, Roberts 
and Allan and other old factors and clerks of 
the compan}^ to end their days. It was early 
recognized as an Indian center, and is the only 
place of the Fish Indians to which Kamiakin 
condescended to send his messengers when he 
was organizing the Indian War of 1855. At 
its best it was the largest Indian settlement on 
the Columbia River west of the Cascades, and 



10 CATHLAMET 

from tlie Indian stories must have numbered in 
the town itself from 500 to 1 ,000 ])e()ple. Like 
all Indian towns it changed pojiulation rapidly, 
and when the whites first knew it probably had 
300 or 400 inhabitants. Sauvie's Island occa- 
sionally had more Indians, but they were there 
only temporarily, digging wapatoes. 

Queen Sally, of Cathlamet, was the oldest living 
Indian on the Lower Columbia in the late fifties 
and early sixties, and her memory ^vent back 
easily to the days of Lew^is and Clark when she 
was a young woman old enough to be married, 
which, with the Indians, meant about fourteen 
years old. Seventy years is extreme old age for 
an Indian, and especially for an Indian woman, 
but (^ueen Sally ,w^as all of this. Judging from her 
looks she might have been anywhere in the cen- 
turies, for never was a more Avrinkled, smoke- 
begrimed, wizened old creature. Princess Ange- 
line, of Seattle, was a blooming young beauty 
beside her. 

It gave one a far-aw^ay feeling, in regard to 
the event not warranted by the years that had 
passed, when from the cliffs above Cathlamet 
she pointed out the spot where the canoes of 
Lewis and Clark were first seen. She said the 
Indians had been on the watch for them for sev- 
eral days, as news had come by Indian post of 



CATHLAMET 11 

the strangers from the East. Lewis and Clark 
with their party came in the afternoon or even- 
ing, and were met by the Indians in their canoes 
at or a little above the modern town of Cath- 
lamet and escorted to the Indian village, which 
was then on the slough below Cathlamet, at 
about the point where the saw mill now is. How 
long they stayed here she could not clearly tell. 
It was evident she confused their westward and 
eastward trips and also their winter stay at 
Clatsop with their stay at the Cathlamet village. 
Twenty-five miles to wandering Indians is a 
bagatelle of too little importance to be con- 
sidered in fixing a locality. It was a time of 
feasting, w^onderment and council making. 
Lewis and Clark were doubtless weary of Indians 
by this time, but the strange sights they saw 
will never be seen again. 



II. 

THE INDIAN VILLAGE 

THE village was made up of cedar houses, 
thirty or forty feet long and fifteen or 
twenty feet wide. How they managed to split 
and cut out the cedar planks, sometimes twenty 
and thirty feet long, two to three feet wide 
and three to six inches thick, of which these 
houses were built, with the tools they had, 
is a mystery. With w^edges made of elkhorn 
and chisels made of Beaver teeth, with flinty 
rocks and with fire, they, in some way, and 
at a great expenditure of labor, cut out the 
boards. The houses were well built, an opening 
was left along the ridge pole for the smoke to 
escape and there were cracks in the walls, but, 
excepting this and the door, there were no open- 
ings. Unless destroyed by fire, these houses 
would stand for ages, as the cedar was almost 
indestructible. Each house was fitted to ac- 
commodate several families. Along the sides, 
which miglit be six or eight feet high, and along 
the rear wall were built beds like steamer bunks, 
one above the other. From the lowest of these 



THE INDIAN VILLAGE 13 

bunks the floor of earth extended out Hke a plat- 
form four or five feet to a depression of a foot or 
two along the center of the lodge, which was re- 
served for the fire place. 

Fully inhabited by Indian men, women, chil- 
dren and dogs, lighted up by the smoky fires, 
the lodge interior looked like a witches' cave. 
Men and women in all conditions as to toilet lay 
sprawled on the earth platform about the fire. 
In the bunks amid dilapidated furs w^ere num- 
berless half-naked children and coyote-looking 
dogs. Along the ceiling hung dried salmon and 
strings of dried clams and roots. The smoke 
circled everywhere, and gave a misty look of 
vastness to the room, and through all like a solid 
atmosphere was the smell, the awful smell of the 
Indian lodge. Fires in an Indian village or an 
occasional abandonment were recurring necessi- 
ties in Indian life. Flesh and blood, even of the 
Indian variety, could not long abide in one Indian 
encampment. From this as well as from the 
necessity of getting food, it came about that the 
Lower River Indian lived in his village for only 
small portions of the year. It is safe to say that 
Lewis and Clark either found a lodge that had 
been little used or slept away from the village. 
No sane white man, except under stress of dire 
necessity, ever slept in a fully populated Indian 



14 CATHLAMET 

lodge that had been used continuously for any 
length of time. 

One of the strange sights that Lewis and Clark 
saw al:)out this Wahkiakum village of Cathlamet 
were the burial canoes. The last of these were 
not destroyed until late in the fifties, and when 
Lewis and Clark came they were very numerous 
about the village and in the Columbia sloughs 
between the Elokomon and Skamokawa Rivers. 
The low, deep moan of the Columbia River bar, 
forty miles to the westward, is clearly heard at 
Cathlamet, and it may be due to this that these 
burial canoes placed high in the Cottonwood and 
Balm of Gilead trees were always placed with 
their sharp-pointed prows to the west. With 
every paddle in place, with his robes and furs 
about him and all his wealth of beads and trink- 
ets at his feet, the dead Indian lay in his war 
canoe waiting for the flood of life which should 
some day come in like the tide from the sunset 
ocean. 

Considering the great value of these canoes 
and the time it took to build one, it almost 
passes belief that they would be sacrificed to a 
simple belief in the future life. It is exactly as 
though upon the death of a multi-millionaire of 
our day all of his moneys, stocks and bonds 



THE INDIAN VILLAGE 15 

should be buried with him, his heirs renouncing 
the use of all his accumulations. 

The Chinook canoe of the lower riA^er was a 
beautiful thing and was as much a home of the 
Indians as was the lodge. In Alaska the Indians 
had good canoes, but nothing that for size, model 
and finish equaled the Indian canoe of the Co- 
lumbia. These river canoes were of all sizes, 
from the one-man hunting canoe that could 
easily be carried, and which required an expert 
to handle, to the large cruising canoe forty or fifty 
feet long and five or six feet wide, which could 
carry thirty or forty people and all their eqviip- 
ments. The straight up and down lines of the 
stern and the bewitching curve of the bow were 
very graceful, and the water lines of bow and 
stern have never been excelled. The build- 
ing of one was the work of 3'ears. It was 
painfully hollowed out with fire and flint 
and beaver-tooth chisel, was steamed within 
with red-hot rocks and water, and was 
stretched to exactly the right proportion and 
kept in place by stretchers strongly sewed in. 
It was swift, beautiful and seaworthy. Its only 
weakness was in the places where the cedar wood 
was cut across the grain to give the lines of bow 
and stern. Here in a heavy seaway the canoe 
would always work, and from here the canoe 



16 CATHLAMET 

would sometimes split from end to end. Many 
a traged}' of the sea was due to this inherent 
weakness, for in these and the Alaskan canoes 
the Indians traveled the entire coast line of the 
Pacific, from the mouth of the Columbia north- 
ward to Sitka and southward to the California 
line, and even farther, and old Indians often 
told of clinging to the broken sides of the canoe 
when it had split, for hours, and even days, 
until the surf rolled them ashore. 



III. 

INDIAN MEN AND WOMEN 

THE Louver River Indians had no horses and 
no place to use them, but dogs they had 
a-plenty. Why they kept them except as sentries 
no one ever knew. They were miserable creatures 
without courage or hunting instincts, but no one 
could come within a hundred yards of an Indian 
lodge without being discovered, and in this prob- 
ably lay then' value to the Indian, for they were 
not eaten except in cases of necessity or upon 
ceremonial occasions. 

The Indians in their canoes were fine-looking 
people. Arms, shoulders and backs were well 
muscled and proportioned, and they handled 
their poles and paddles with grace and skill, but 
away from their canoes the effect was not so 
good. They almost uniformly had short, squatty 
legs, sometimes made crooked by continual squat- 
ting in the canoes, and this gave them a curious- 
ly top-heavy effect. 

Compared with the Horse Indians of Eastern 
Oregon and Washington they looked weak and 
insignificant. They were not as warlike a people 

17 



18 CATHLAMET 

as the Horse Indian, and in a land 1)attle would 
have had but a poor chance. Intellectually they 
were superior, and the Indians of Eastern Oregon 
complained that at the Cascades, where the native 
peoples met to trade together, they were uni- 
formly outwitted by their salt-water brethren. 
Upon the water they were superior also, and no 
Indian of the plains could handle a canoe as the 
Salt Water Indian could. The women were short, 
squatty creatures, wdth a tendency to grow fat 
and wrinkled when they could get food enough 
to grow fat on; the wrinkles they acquired any- 
way. From fifteen to twenty the Indian girl was 
a warm-blooded creature, not at all bad-looking, 
but after this she aged rapidly; at thirty was old, 
and at forty fit only to tan buckskins and do 
heavy work. In their native state very few of 
them lived much beyond fifty. The treatment of 
them by the Indian men was brutal to a degree 
that white women can hardly realize. Neverthe- 
less they had a great deal of influence, and while 
an Indian in a fit of bad temper might in the 
evening knock down his tired squaw and leave 
her lying in the ashes by the fire, the next morn- 
ing she would be his mistress of the household 
as usual. It was astonishing what good women 
the native women were, and how patiently and 
honestly they toiled and suffered for their worth- 



INDIAN MEN AND WOMEN 19 

less husbands. Afterwards when the white men 
came, the chance to marry one of the King George 
men or Bostons was to an Indian woman a chance 
to enter paradise. No white husband was ever 
as bad as an Indian, and however drunken and 
worthless the white man might be considered 
to be b}^ his own people, he was a marvel of 
husbandly virtues in the eyes of his native wife. 
His word was law, and to him she was faithful 
to the death. Long centuries of oppression 
made the Indian woman thankful for even a poor 
specimen of a man. Thrice happy was her lot 
when she was taken for wife by a decent white 
man. In her inarticulate way she greatly re- 
joiced and sacrificed herself for him gladly. 
There are many people in Oregon and Wash- 
ington who have Indian blood in their veins, 
and few, very few, of them have ever had reason 
to blush for their Indian mothers. 



IV. 

INDIAN CHILDREN AND BOYS 

rriHE children that Lewis and Clark saw on the 
-*- lower river were odd-looking creatures. 
The babies were strapped to boards and looked 
like miniature mummies of Egyptian times, but 
the older ones were ceaselessly active. They were 
little brown fellows with slender legs that upheld 
and rapidly carried about a protuberant stom- 
ach, apparently four sizes too large for the legs 
below and the head above. It is astonishing how 
much they looked like the pictures of Brownies 
in our children's picture-books. Amongst them 
the rate of mortality was high, and they grew 
up with the dogs as best they could; were fed, 
and in a fashion clothed and sheltered, and that 
was all. As soon as the little Indian could run 
about he commenced to hunt and fish, and in 
mere love of slaughter would frequent the streams 
and maim and kill the salmon coming up to 
spawn. The little creek by Cathlamet was a 
favorite stream of the Fall salmon, and here the 
29 



INDIAN CHILDREN AND BOYS 21 

little Indians would gather and spear fish until 
they were weary of the sport, and would then 
in mere wantonness throw their captures on the 
rocks to spoil. At thirteen and fourteen the 
boys would begin seriously to hunt for game. 
The old Queen Anne muskets that they had in 
early days would be carefully loaded, not a grain 
of powder or a single shot would be wasted, for 
these commodities in the early days were diffi- 
cult to obtain. In his little one-man canoe the 
youth would silently paddle through the sloughs 
looking for ducks and geese, of which there w^ere 
countless thousands. He never attempted to 
shoot on the wing, and would rarely fire at a single 
bird, but w^oulcl maneuver for hours to get a 
chance to fire into a sitting flock at short range. 

As the great flocks of wild fowl had then, as 
they have now, a most exasperating habit of 
lying in open water beyond gun shot, a favorite 
device with the Indian w^as to cover his canoe with 
green boughs so that it w^ould appear to be a 
mere floating heap of brush wood, and lying in 
ambush under this the hunter would patiently 
wait for hours for the birds to come near or for 
a favoring wind to float him into their midst. 
An Indian enjoyed killing ducks and geese in 



22 CATHLAMET 

tliis way. The stealthiness and the ease of it, 
l)otli appealed to him, besides it meant many 
birds for one shot. 

So strongly was the necessity for economy in 
powder and shot impressed upon them that a 
young Indian about fourteen years old, seeing one 
day a large cougar about to cross a stream on a 
log did not fire at him from the canoe, but crept 
ashore and hid himself at the end of the log 
until the cougar nearly touched the end of his 
gun, when he fired, and, in the words of Western 
Ike, * 'Bio wed a hole in that cougar that a bull 
bat could a' flew through without teching his 
wings on either side.'' Spoken to about the risk 
he had taken the youngster said he couldn't afford 
to waste a load of shot, and had to make sure 
w^ork. These old guns missed fire very frequent- 
ly, and the little Indian's economy might have 
cost him dear, but to his mind life w^as about 
the cheapest of his possessions; it had never 
cost him anything. For large game shooting 
they would frequently make a slug for their 
muskets by w^hittling out a wooden plug the 
size of the interior of the gun barrel, and W'ith 
this make a mold in damp sand, into w-hich was 
poured the melted lead. The result w^as a fearful 



INDIAN CHILDREN AND BOYS 23 

missile. It would not go straight for forty yards, 
but as it was never fired at such a great distance 
this made no difference, for by lying in wait or 
careful stalking the Indian would get so close 
in to his game that a miss was impossible. A 
bear slain in this way looked after his decease 
as if he had been hit by a section of Mount 
Hood in some "Battle of the Gods." 



V. 
THE INDIAN HUNTING 

OPPOSITE Cathlamet is Piiget Island, 
named })}' Vancouver's exploring party on 
its first trip up the Columbia, in 1792, and here 
the Indians hunted the deer in the low, marshy 
lands along the sloughs. In the early times, 
before they used guns, the bow and arrow were 
sometimes used, but generally the hunts were 
elaborate affairs and long lines of skirmishers 
drove the frightened deer into inclosures or 
pitfalls, but after the traders came with guns and 
gunpowder, the same wary tactics and careful 
stalking were employed in deer hunting as in 
the pursuit of other wild game. 

Across the river, beyond its two channels and 
Pugei Island, was high land again, and here is 
one of the most beautiful pieces of forest and 
one of the most striking slopes in all of the Coast 
Mountains. Commencing at Cathlamet Head, 
the unbroken slope sweeps easterly to a point 
back of Westport, and between it and the Ne- 
halem River, for miles, the hunter travels in a 
great fir forest and up a gentle slope until he 

24 



THE INDIAN HUNTING 25 

reaches an elevation of about three thousand feet, 
and sees the Columbia River to the north and 
east, the Nehalem River to the south and the 
Pacific Ocean to the west. Looking at it across 
the river from the hill in Cathlamet by the Birnie 
house, the sweeping outline of this long slope 
presents one of the most graceful and impressive 
scenes on the Lower Columbia. 

Here Wholiky and Scarborough and all the 
mighty hunters of the Lower Columbia hunted 
the elk and the bear and the long aisles of those 
magnificent woods have seen stirring sights. 
To watch one of these thorough hunters track an 
elk was always a fresh delight. For hours he 
would go uphill and down and out and in, in de- 
vious wanderings. Here a little twig misplaced 
or a leaf pressed down, signs too faint for the 
inexperienced to even notice, would tell him 
when and where the great beast had passed. 
No bloodhound ever followed the track more 
persistently. After hours, perhaps, of this kind 
of work, the signs would grow clearer and easier 
to follow, and the hunter's eyes would grow 
keen and hot, step by step he would increase 
his speed, and piece by piece he would drop his 
wrappings and clothes. It was said of Indian 
Dick that he rarely had any clothes, to speak of, 
on at the death, and yet so perfect was his 



26 CATHLAMET 

woodland instinct that he would afterwards 
retrace his tracks for miles and gather up every 
article. 

It almost seemed as if the hunter had the 
sense of smell possessed by hunting dogs, but 
the Indians disclaimed this capacity and to their 
familiar hunting friends talked freely about the 
way they found the trail. One thing that helped 
them was that they were familiar with the ground 
and knew the runways and habits of the animals 
and could very nearly guess where any particu- 
lar one was bound. 

Where an elk had been feeding it was very 
difficult to follow him, and sometimes the Indian 
would make a short cut to find out where he had 
left his feeding grounds, and this made it occa- 
sionally necessary to look up the back track, but 
ordinarily it w^as a straight-away stalk for miles 
through the brush and heavy, timber, and the 
hunter generally followed in the exact trail of 
the animal. 

At the beginning of a chase an Indian hunter 
like Wholiky or Indian Dick would often ven- 
ture a prediction as to where the chase would 
end. 'We catch him on Rocky Hill little way 
over there," or *'on little creek," or elsewhere, 
and usuall}^ there was where he was found. 

On ordinary ground the track could be readily 



THE INDIAN HUNTING 27 

followed and on hard rocky soil there was always 
enough dust or vegetation to retain some trace 
of the passage of so heavy an animal as a deer, 
elk or bear; a dislodged pebble, a turned leaf or 
a crushed blade of grass was enough. The mar- 
velous thing about it was the quickness and ac- 
curacy with which these slight signs would be 
seen and interpreted. A white hunter follow- 
ing his Indian friend had plenty of time to watch 
the process, and it was as interesting as the 
working out of a great puzzle. To an ordinary 
white man who knew little of the woods or of 
hunting, it was magic pure and simple. 

The closing in of the native hunter on his game 
was a stirring thing to watch. Long centuries 
of hunting with bows and arrows, feeble, short- 
range weapons, had bred into the Indian the 
habit of getting close up, and his having a gun 
made no difference with his habit. 

Carrying his body low crouched so that it 
seemed to glide along the ground like a snake, 
placing each step with noiseless certainty and 
going through the underbrush as quietly as a 
fish in water, the stealthy panther-like quality 
of the Indian here show^ed at its best, for, close 
to his prey, fairly vibrating with tense and sub- 
dued energy, the Indian of the chase was a very 



2S CATHLAMET 

different looking creature from the Indian of the 
lodge. 

On one occasion Indian Wholiky in the wood 
and heavy underbrush of the Nehalem Moun- 
tains crept up so close to a black bear that only 
the thickness of a tree separated them. Poor 
bruin was astonished and dead in the same mo- 
ment. The black bear in his chosen habitat of 
thick brush is one of the most unapproachable 
of animals b}^ stalking, and poor bruin had a right 
to be astonished. 



Vl. 

THE FOREST WAYS 

FEW people appreciate how different the 
forest home of the Indians of the Lower 
Columbia was from the habitat of other Indian 
peoples and what effect this had upon them. 
Cathlamet was situated on the bank of the 
Columbia River and was in a mere notch cut 
out of one of the most remarkable forests in 
the world. 

To the North, East, South and West for hun- 
dreds of miles the Douglas fir, now called in the 
trade by the commonplace name of Oregon pine, 
covered the earth with a green mantle two to 
three hundred feet in thickness. 

The growth of one of these forests was as good 
an example of the opulence of nature as could 
anywhere be found. Over the bare ground 
caused by a burn or windfall thousands of the 
cones of the fir tree would be scattered from 
the adjoining forest. Chattering pine squirrels 
and birds and the winds would carry the seeds. 
The next year the ground would be green with 
tiny trees, little fairy things of which there might 

29 



30 CATHLAMET 

be dozens to every square 3^ard. In four or five 
years the ground would still be green, but the 
carpet of verdure would be perhaps six or seven 
feet deep, and of the little tiny trees perhaps 
nineteen out of twent}^ would have been crowded 
to death, and so dense would be the surface of 
this green carpet that the lower limbs of the little 
trees, and many of the little trees themselves, 
shut out from all light, would be dying and fall- 
ing away. For two hundred years the process 
would go on, each young tree vigorously reaching 
upward to keep its head in the sunshine but 
making no attempt to reach out sideways, for 
this was hopeless. Only the stronger trees 
survived the struggle and thousands died each 
year shut out from light and life by their 
stronger brothers. The lower branches dropped 
off farther up every year as the green pile of 
the fir carpet was lifted higher and higher on the 
vigorous young stems. In perhaps fifty or a 
hundred years from the time the seed dropped 
on the ground there would be a compact young 
forest of beautiful timber fit for the masts and 
spars of ships, each tree eighteen or twenty- four 
inches through at the ground, going straight up 
into the air a beautiful straight shaft of nearly 
the same size a hundred feet without a branch 
or leaf, and then for fifty or one hundred 



THE FOREST WAYS 31 

feet tapering to the top and leafing out into 
the sunshine. When the forest was fully grown 
this green mass of leafage would be two or 
three hundred feet from the ground. Looked 
at from above, from the top of some high hill, 
for instance, this continuous forest appeared 
like a great green carpet spread evenly over a 
great sea of mountains, and it extended over 
hill and valley for thousands of scjuare miles 
along the Pacific Ocean. Looked at from be- 
neath the forest vistas looked like the groined 
aisles of some great cathedral with sweeping 
lengths to be measured by miles instead of feet. 
Since the coming of the white man uncounted 
millions of feet of lumber have been cut from 
this forest and fires have in places ravaged it 
and yet so immense is its extent and so vigorous 
is it power of renewal that it is today to the casual 
sightseer the same unbroken forest that it has 
been from the beginning. 

This was the home and the hunting ground 
of the Indian of the Low^er Columbia. Some 
parts of it he knew well but into other parts he 
would not go, and it was curious to see how the 
places where game and food were plentiful be- 
came familiar ground while the other places 
were invested with superstitious terrors. Along 
the rivers where canoes could go the Indian 



32 CATHLAMET 

was at home, and along some of the prairies and 
smaller streams of the Willamette Valley, Indian 
villages and homes were established, but the 
forest itself was untouched and except where it 
was hunted in was unknown and feared. 

Thunder storms are of rare occurrence in the 
Valley of the Columbia and hence the Indians 
were very much impressed by them when they 
did occur. 

Jim Crow Mountain, near Brookfield, was a 
rough piece of country in which the hunting 
was poor. It was ^'Mesatchie Illihee,'' and 
so in time the Indians connected together 
what they thought was cause and effect. 
Jim Crow Mountain obtained the reputation of 
being a thunder blasted district and as 
being the chosen resting place of the gigantic 
Thunder Bird who so terrified the poor Indians 
with the flashings of its eyes and the roll and 
thunder of its dark wings. 

A part of the Upper Valley of the Wenatchee 
above the lake had also the reputation amongst 
the Indians of the neighborhood of being ''Mesat- 
chie Illihee" and of being the haunt of evil spirits. 
The first surveying party of the whites that 
went through identified the evil spirits in clouds 
of mosquitoes, which at times made the place 
uninhabitable by either men or game. ''Mesat- 



THE FOREST WAYS 33 

chie Illihee" meant only rough, bad or difficult 
country, but Indian ghosts and hobgoblins 
seemed to like this kind of country, for they 
were always located in it by the Indian story 
tellers. 

The forest was so vast that the multitude of 
animals and birds that roamed through and 
lived in it were completely out of sight, and it 
was quite a common experience for the early 
explorers and surveyors to travel through it for 
weary days without seeing more than a pine 
marten or a chattering squirrel. Lewis and Clark 
in their expedition followed the rivers and this 
and good fortune and judgment w^as all that 
saved the party from disaster, for hunters well 
equipped but unacquainted w4th the woods, have 
starved in these great forests. 

The Indians tried no experiments and unless 
compelled wandered into no unknown country, 
and the old Indian trails on the Lower Columbia 
were few in number. There was a well known 
wa}" for Indians and Indian canoes from Chinook 
River to the Naselle and thence to Shoalwater 
Bay and another from Shoalwater Bay to Grays 
Harbor. There was an Indian trail from the 
waters of the Cowlitz River to Puget Sound and 
another around the Cascades of the Columbia; 
and in the Willamette Valley, owing to its more 



34 CATHLAMET 

open character horses were used and there were 
many trails to different points. 

The trails used by Indians who did not 
use horses were always made by the tramping 
of feet and were never cut out or graded in any 
way. They nearly always went up the sharp 
points of the hills and along the sharp backbones 
of the ridges, and this was done to avoid fallen 
timber 

Thirty-five years ago a young hunter was 
searching for deer in the little range of 
mountains between the Willamette Slough and 
the Tualitin Plains. It was an idle, easy hunting, 
more for the love of wandering than for the desire 
of killing, and in the Summer evening he sat 
down to rest and look around. Something 
peculiar about a vista in the woods attracted 
his attention and he observed it closely. Appar- 
ently an old trail, it tempted him to wander 
along it. For miles it kept its course and soon 
it was clear that here was the old Indian trail 
from the Tualitin Plains to the Columbia River 
at Sauvie's Island. Overgrown with moss, 
covered with leaves and mold, it was still the 
old trail that in olden times had been trodden 
by thousands of moccasined feet. There were 
no choppings or l)lazed trees along it, and even 
the roots of the trees rounded and rubbed by 



THE FOREST WAYS 35 

the clinging clasp of soft, flexible feet showed 
plainly that they had not been trodden or marred 
by the heavy foot-gear of the white man. Every 
foot of the location and every sinuous turn of 
the old highway bespoke its origin and use. It 
w^as the old and fading signature of a dead 
people. So dim and spectral and yet so un- 
mistakable, it was the rising of an Indian ghost. 

Following along the shadowy trail, he reached 
the summit, from where he saw before him the 
valley of the Lower Columbia. The mountains 
to the Eastward, the great river in the foreground, 
the Willamette Valley stretching to the South- 
ward and many miles of river and forest lighted 
up by the evening sunlight. 

As the evening deepened the young hunter 
could by a very easy stretch of the imagination 
see along the path lines of bent Indian squaws, 
each carrying on her back by a strap about her 
forehead a heavy load, and some, too, little 
babies in their funny little bound-up packing- 
cases, and trooping merrily at their heels, the 
little elf-like, copper-colored children and the 
w^olfish dogs, and occasionally with these, and 
yet apart as became his dignity, an Indian warrior 
foot-loose and comfortable. 

It was a long procession and it had passed 
and repassed that way for hundreds of years, 



36 CATHLAMET 

and now only the trail was left, but the trail 
told many things to any one who coidd see. 

To understand the Indian migration you 
nuist know what they are traveling for, because 
the Indian life was spent in traveling. In this 
ease apparently these Indians had not traveled 
this road for war or sight-seeing or pleasure. 
It had only been the old quest of food. 

Immediately below the sightseer from this 
point lies Sauvie's Island, stretching for fifteen or 
twenty miles down the Columbia River, and this 
island, famous in the old history of the Hudson 
Bay Company and of the pioneers, was a garden 
of the wapato, the Indian potato. The lakes 
and overflowed lands were green with its arrow- 
shaped leaves, and here every Autumn the 
Indians used to gather for the purpose of 
harvesting it, and the stores so obtained helped 
them through the Winter. On the river was 
also the gathering place for dr3dng and smoking 
salmon. The Cascades on the Columbia and 
the Falls of the Willamette at Oregon City were 
great gathering places in the salmon season, but 
there were plenty of other streams where the 
salmon could be caught. It was preserved by 
drying and smoking, and from an Indian encamp- 
ment in the olden time an odor used to float 
down the wind that was so pungent and charac- 



THE FOREST WAYS 37 

teristic that it could almost be seen. No real 
and truly pioneer who ever lived near the Indians 
can to this day catch the slightest whiff of ancient 
fish without seeing in fancy the Indian lodges. 
The Indians near the Coast made trips to the 
ocean for the native cranberry and for clams. 
These later were dried and smoked and so 
cured, with an abundant sprinkling of sand, 
were probably the most indestructible food 
known. 

Along or near the Coast were also the 
favorite hunting grounds for elk. The meat 
of the elk and deer was cut in strips and dried 
over the fire, making what was known as jerked 
meat. Farther up the river the sweet glutinous 
root of the camas was dried and packed for 
Winter food. 

The black bear is a cunning berry eater, 
and there is no more curious woodland sight 
than that of a big black bear sitting upon his 
haunches drawing down huckleberry bushes and 
picking off the tiny berries one by one, but even 
the black bear is a dullard in gathering berries 
compared with the Indian women. They knew 
every l)erry bush and patch anywhere within 
reaching distance and knew just how and when 
to gather them and Olallies (berries) formed a 
great part of the Indian food supply. 



38 CATHLAMET 

To the people who knew it the forest was a 
magnificent granary of food, and perhaps one of 
the most pitiful stories of the West is that of a 
party of Eastern men fleeing panic-stricken from 
anticipated starvation, leaving their comrades to 
die by the way, because a little snow flurry and 
a little hunger met them in the woods. The 
mountains and the great forest were strange 
and terrifying to them. Had they been Indians 
or Western and forest-trained men they would 
have come out at their leisure, hungry and thin, 
half starved and hollow down to their boots, 
perhaps, but still all together. 

So far as Indian tradition goes there was 
never any famine amongst the native tribes of 
the Lower Columbia. When Azrael took his 
chosen from amongst these Indians to the 
Happy Hunting Grounds he walked with them 
along other death-trails than the dreary one of 
starvation. 



VII. 

THE COMING AND THE GOING 

WHERE did the Indian of the Columbia 
River come from? 
Crab Creek, on the great plain of the Columbia, 
in Eastern Washington, is one of the most 
remarkable streams in the Northwest. At its 
source near Medical Lake it is a mere brook, 
and here in 1870 there were trout, little finger- 
lings, by the hundreds. A few miles to the 
Westward the stream disappeared in sand and 
basaltic rock. Again a few miles below it came 
to the surface a larger stream than at first, and 
with larger trout. For 100 miles went this 
peculiar stream in this way, now sinking and 
now rising, every reach of open water stocked 
with • trout of appropriate size, until a little 
below Moses Lake, south of the Grand Coulee 
and 20 or 30 miles from the Columbia River, 
it finally disappeared in a waste of sand and 
rock. Thirty years ago in its lower reaches 
fat half-pound trout went in schools, and as 
the engineers of the Northern Pacific Railroad 
passed by they had much argument as to how 



40 CATHLAMET 

the trout ^ot there, and as to how the right- 
sized fish got in the right-sized streams. But 
the question is still unsolved. In some such 
fashion men speculate upon the origin of the 
Pacific Coast aborigines. How came this people 
to be scattered along the coast and in the interior, 
each one in his proper habitat, and who were 
the Adam and Eve of the Chinooks and Cath- 
lamets? It is an endless subject, for they were 
apparently a people to themselves and resembled 
no others, and perhaps the answer of Chief 
Moses, of the Wenatchees, is as good as any. 
Riding l)y this self-same Crab Creek in leisurely 
fashion one Summer day, he was asked how the 
trout got in. With an indulgent smile for the 
youthful ignorance that prompted such a ques- 
tion, the old chief answered: ''Mika ticka cumtux 
caqua ucook tenas salmon chawco copa tenas 
chuck? Na, na, chawco, nesica tillicum be nesika 
cumtux 3^aca ciuansum mitlite.'' (You want 
to know how the little salmon got into the little 
creek? No, no, they didn't get in. My people 
know, and I know, that they have always been 
there.) 

Another curious question has to do with 
the scanty native ])opulation of Western Oregon 
and Washington when first known l)v the white 
men. The ran";e was limitless and food was 



THE COMING AND THE GOING 41 

abundant beyond measure. The country could 
have supported easily five times the number 
of native people that were on it. These Indians 
always claimed that they were once a populous 
and powerful people, but that in some way they 
had provoked the Divine anger and been de- 
stroyed, and this claim is undoubtedly based 
upon fact, and on this question, although there 
are uncertainties regarding the manner of the 
decimation of the Indians of the Willamette 
and Lower Columbia Rivers, we have something 
definite to go on. This decimation began 
before the first white settlers came, and was 
largely finished before 1830. None of the 
histories give any idea of the number of Indians 
who inhabited this region before historic times, 
and this can only be conjectured, but it is certain 
that once a commensurate Indian population 
filled Western Oregon from the Cascade Moun- 
tains to the Pacific Ocean. Every aged Indian 
told stories of a time when the rivers were lined 
with villages and floated many canoes. At 
Marr's Landing, about three miles below Castle 
Rock, on the Columbia, the river has in the 
last few years been washing away what is known 
as the island, and has uncovered the site of old 
Indian camp fires. These stretch in a long 
line up and down the beach. They are covered 



42 CATHLAMET 

with two or three feet of loam, and on this fir 
trees a hundred years old have grown. As 
many as fifteen or twenty stone hammers have 
been found about a single fireplace, and the old 
charred fires are preserved as they were 200 
years ago. One pathetic little relic found 
amongst the big stone hammers was a tiny little 
hammer and pestle, evidently playthings of an 
Indian child. On Archer Mountain, a mile or 
tw^o west, are what appear to be ancient fortifica- 
tions that would have required many warriors to 
man. No village of this magnitude w^as known 
there by white men. In the day of Lewis and 
Clark there was only a scattering settlement 
near Castle Rock, and a migratory trading band 
at the Cascades. The Indian flint factory at 
the Clackamas River suggests a large pojDulation, 
and Cathlamet was always a greater city of 
the dead than of the living. Betw^een the 
Elokomon and the SkamokaAva the sloughs 
were lined with the burial canoes of the dead, 
and as only distinguished men were so buried, 
this stood for a large population, probably greater 
than that of the Bella-Bella Indian Village in 
British Columbia. These canoe burials were 
ancient. Cedar wood is almost indestructible, 
and no living Indians knew the name or lineage 
of the dead or resented the resurrection that 



THE COMING AND THE GOING 43 

the white children accomplished in searching 
for Indian ornaments. They tumbled the 
bones out of the bed of loam and leaves that 
had gathered over them, and they were the 
bones of a hundred years gone. In sport the 
children put them together and speculated 
upon what manner of men they were, and the 
Indian children joined in the game, for the dead 
were the old, old people. Below^ the Indian 
village the ground was black and the plough 
turned up countless skulls and bones with flints 
and Indian arrowheads, bespeaking long occu- 
pation and a numerous population. Long be- 
fore 1800 the Indian had evidently reached the 
height of his power and prosperity, and when 
the white man came Avas already on the way to 
extinction. 

The waning of the Indian power of the Lower 
Columbia is shrouded in mystery. Young Indian 
girls told the story of it in hushed whispers, 
and the old Indians spoke of it reluctantly. 
Had the Death Angel come in bodily form they 
could not have been more impressed. The 
wail for the dead, so they said, w^as heard all 
along the rivers, and no one even hoped for 
life when the slaughter was on. The Indians 
named the chief instrument of destruction the 
"Cole sick.'' With the white man came the 



44 CATHLAMET 

smallpox and the measles, but the ^'Cole sick^' 
was neither of these. About 1820 and 1830 
epidemics of the old disease swept among the 
remaining Indians, and historians are puzzled 
to give it a name. One suggests that fever and 
ague came with the settlers, but the Valley of 
the Columbia was never a fever and ague coun- 
try and the pioneers, however malaria stricken 
at the beginning, must have been thoroughly 
disinfected by their long trip across the plains. 
Others say that the turning up of the soil by 
the Hudson's Bay people at the farms at Fort 
Vancouver released malaria from the soil and 
this caused the epidemic, but the disease was 
here before the farms, and it was impossible 
that a disease which raged over hundreds of 
square miles could have come from so trivial 
a cause. It may have been the modern la grippe 
striking an unprotected people. Whatever it 
was no more potent angel of death ever visited 
an afflicted people. 

The white man had no need of war or vio- 
lence in his dealings with these Indians, nor 
did he employ them, for the "Sahalee T3^ee," 
the Indian god, had struck before him. 

After 1800 the smallpox, measles and 
consumption were always bus}^, and a death 
in the Indian village was a common thinii;. There 



THE COMING AND THE GOING 45 

was no doctor at Cathlamet, and in pitiful 
dependence upon their superior skill the Indians 
used to come to James Birnie and William 
Strong, the only white settlers there, and ask 
for medicine, which was always given them, 
although it was no inconsiderable burden to 
supply it. 

But sickness in an Indian lodge was not to be 
checked by medicines. 



Vlll. 
THE MEDICINE MAN 

IN addition to these medicines Indians of 
the higher circles had Indian medicine men. 
A sick Indian, a smoky lodge, a hundred Indians 
beating the roof with poles to a monotonous 
chant and dance, and a temporary maniac 
manipulating the sufferer with rattles and Indian 
trumpery, it was weird medical work, and soon 
transferred the Indian of the higher circles to 
the select circle of Abraham's bosom. 

The Indian war dance has for the last one hun- 
dred years been practically unknown on the 
lower river. Occasionally some feeble effort was 
made to imitate it, but nothing was ever done 
that could for one moment be compared Avith 
the wild rush and frenzy of a genuine war dance 
about the campfires of the Spokanes and 
Cayuses. These were performances to stir the 
blood and raise the hair. Nowhere along the 
seacoast were there any war dances to speak 
of. Even among the Hydahs, Tlinklits and 
Chilcats of Alaska the war dance was a spirit- 
less, tame affair. The medicine dance, however, 



THE MEDICINE MAN 41 

an entirely different thing, was at its best among 
the Coast tribes. 

There were reports of Indian lodges in 
Western Oregon that were two hundred 
and twenty-four feet long, but this is probably 
an exaggeration, and a lodge sixty or seventy 
feet long must have been a large one. In such 
a lodge in case of sickness of some distinguished 
person would be gathered at night a hundred or 
more Indians. In the sunken place in the mid- 
dle of the lodge cleaned out for this purpose, and 
between the two end-fires would be placed 
upon a mat the sufferer lightly covered with 
furs. Around the sides and ends of the lodge 
in double and triple ranks, each with a pole in 
his hands, would be placed every available Indian 
man, woman and child. 

In Cathlamet the white children would 
sometimes join in and were always welcome. 
At a given signal from some master of ceremonies 
the dance would commence by CA^erybody, at 
first slowly, but afterwards more cpickly, jump- 
ing up and down in their places to a loud chant 
of yo-o-o, yo-o-o, 5^0, the first two long 
drawn out and the last sharpl}^ cut off and 
shouted almost explosively. No one stirred 
from his position except monotonously to jump 
up and down with the pole held upright in both 



48 CATHLAMET 

hands in front of him, so that the movement 
brought it into contact with the low roof in 
perfect time with the chant and the jumping, 
the movements being so timed that the poles 
struck the roof all together with the final ^'yo." 
The noise was deafening and the lodge would 
shake in every timber. After this had gone on 
with increasing enthusiasm for a half hour or so 
and the patient was supposed to be sufficiently 
prepared and the evil spirit properly alarmed, 
a terrific noise w^ould be heard in the darkness 
outside, and suddenly the medicine man and 
four or five assistants would come bounding 
through the door wdth howls and yells into the 
smoky interior. They looked like fiends, bodies 
naked, faces covered with a hideous mask, over 
which towered a frightful headdress, and in 
their hands rattles, large cumbersome things 
decorated with teeth and feathers. This dress 
varied with different people and different medi- 
cine men, but the one idea was to make it as 
hideous and awe-inspiring as possible so as 
to impress and frighten the demons who had 
wrought the evil witchcraft upon the sufferer. 
Not for one moment did the dancing, chanting 
or pounding cease or vary in its monotony. 
The medicine man howling dismally circled 
with great leaps and bounds about his patient, 



THE MEDICINE MAN 49 

in sporting phrase, ''sparring for an opening" 
to get to close grips with the evil spirit. Finally 
his- chance came. The spirit, invisible to all but 
him, had been caught off his guard. He rushed 
in, seized the sick man, and with hands and 
teeth attempted to drag from him the demon 
that tormented him. In the contest the patient 
was tossed and roughly handled, for Indian 
devils come out reluctantly. The performance 
lasted for hours, taking the greater part of the 
night and the assemblage was wrought up to 
frenzy. The treatment stopped only because 
human nature could endure no more. With 
the smoke, noise and general atmosphere the 
interior of the lodge became unbearable and 
the physical strain was too great to be longer 
endured. 

Sustained and soothed by this struggle with 
the evil one in his body, the sick man him- 
self with patience and before many days gener- 
ally gave up the ghost. 



IX. 

THE SWEAT HOUSE 

THEY had another device that for quick 
dispatch was superior even to the personal 
treatment of the medicine man, and this was 
the Indian sweat house. No Indian man in his 
native state voluntarily or for the sole purpose 
of cleansing himself ever took a bath. He trusted 
to the rain or to the necessary swimming, to 
passing through the wet woods and grass or to 
mere dry attrition for all the personal cleanliness 
he deemed necessary. It created a sensation 
in the highest social circles of the Chinooks, 
therefore when Duncan McDougall caused his 
Indian bride-elect to be thoroughly soaked and 
washed preliminary to the marriage ceremony, 
and the fact was considered of so much import- 
ance that history has gravely recorded it as one 
of the notable circumstances that attended that 
notable wedding. 

History, however, in giving so much prom- 
inence to this fact, has done injustice to the 
Indian woman. She was by instinct more decent 
than her Indian master and under favoring 

50 



THE SWEAT HOUSE 51 

circumstances was neat and clean. To her a 
bath, although rare, was not an unknown 
thing, and therefore the sweat house was not 
ordinarily for her. To the masculine Indian, 
however, a hot bath seemed the greatest sacrifice 
he could make to the deities that ruled disease 
and death, and so it happened far back in the 
history of the race that some aboriginal genius 
with a talent for inventing great sacrifices 
invented and brought into use the Indian sweat 
house. They were not much used on the Colum- 
bia River near the ocean, but on the Cowlitz 
and Lewis Rivers, all along the Valley of the 
Willamette and on the Upper Columbia and 
its tributaries sweat houses were everywhere 
to be seen. They were little, mound-shaped 
structures like a flat, old-fashioned bee-hive, 
were perhaps four feet in height and five feet in 
diameter, the size and form varying a little in 
different localities, and were constructed on 
the banks of the cold running streams. They 
were made of willow branches, loosely inter- 
twined after the fashion of a great basket upside 
down, Avithout any opening except a hole in 
front of just sufficient size for a man to crawl 
in. After the willow work was completed it 
was daubed over with clay, making an almost 
impervious hut. The inside dimensions were 



52 CATHLAMET 

carefully calculated so as to accommodate one 
man, crouched into the smallest possible com- 
pass, with the necessary apparatus for a vapor 
bath, and the manner of its use was simple. 
After heating a number of large stones almost 
if not quite red hot the Indian, naked as the day 
he was born, and with a vessel of water, would 
crawl in and take the stones in also. Closing 
the door up tightly he would pour water on the 
hot stones until he was almost parboiled with 
the hot steam. After bearing this as long as 
he could the Indian would crawl out and without 
any preparation would plunge into the running 
stream. In this manner would be accomplished 
the second great medical treatment of the Indian. 
This course was taken for any illness or indis- 
position, and would be taken even in midwinter, 
it not being an unusual thing for a sick Indian 
after such a vapor bath to plunge into the water 
while snowflakes were whirling in the air and 
ice running in the river. Where the indisposition 
was slight or due only to an uncleanly life, 
the Indian would survive the treatment and be 
even benefited by it, and it was these cases that 
maintained its credit as a ''good medicine" in 
the eyes of the tribes. 

With measles, small])ox and other diseases 
of similar character it was almost sure to caus^ 



THE S WE A T HO USE 53 

speedy death, but as the Indian did not dis- 
criminate and with cheerful patience took it 
for granted that the afflicted one if he died was 
fated to death anyway, it did not discredit the 
remedy. 

Occasionally an Indian would kill a med- 
icine man^ or, as was once done by a sorrow^- 
ing chief of the Klickitats, lasso the unsuccessful 
doctor about the neck and with the lasso fast 
to the saddle bow, ride his horse at full speed 
until the medical head was separated from the 
body, but no fault could be found with the 
sweat house, which maintained its credit as a 
sovereign remedy until many years after the 
coming of the whites, and this accounts for the 
fact that measles amongst the Indian was about 
as deadly as the smallpox. 



X. 

THE SINS OF THE FATHERS 

WITH the white man came whisky and 
death hand in hand, and with him came 
the sii])tle laws under which nature punishes 
infractions of its moral code, and these laws 
struck at the very source of life of the Indian 
people. 

Lucy Quillis, one of several of the name, for 
it passed from one to another, was the little nurse 
in the white family. She was carefully taught, 
clothed and cared for. But in those days you 
might just as well have put a pretty little tiger 
cat in pantelets. On her part, with the very 
best intentions, she taught her infant charges 
the Chinook language, how to gamble in Indian 
fashion, and some other things. When she was 
fifteen or sixteen years old, after the fashion of 
the young girls of her race, she fled from the 
house with her lover, a most unworthy scamp, 
and so began the life which ended a few years 
later in all that was left of poor Lucy, a mangled, 
battered body, being gathered up from the floor 
of the madhouse and ])uried. The "madhouse'' 

54 



THE SINS OF THE FATHERS 55 

of the Lower Columbia and of Puget Sound was 
not in pioneer days a lunatic asylum or a female 
seminary, only a judicious combination of the 
two with unlimited whisky thrown in. 

The Indian woman of the Northwest Pacific 
Coast was not a flower-garlanded maiden or a 
frivolous French soubrette or Light o' Love, 
as so many Indian romances depict her. There 
was in her from childhood up a certain gravity 
and sober earnestness which was the natural 
result of her sober, hard-working life. For 
unnumbered centuries the burden of the toil 
and responsibility of her people had been upon 
her shoulders, and so far as she had anything 
to think with, she was a thoughtful, earnest 
woman. Inarticulate and coy in the expression 
of her feeling to a degree that imposed upon 
people who did not know of the fires that glowed 
beneath, she was in reality alive and earnest 
and had great capacities for joy and suffering. 
Above all things she was a simple, law-abiding 
creature. In the tribe, as a maiden, she obe3^ed 
without question the moral code such as it was 
of her people. Married to an Indian husband 
she was his slave, and married to a white man 
and made acquainted with his moral law, for 
his wife, she would have passed through fire, 
torture and death before she would have gone 



56 CATHLAMET 

one stop out of the straight ])ath in which he 
desired her to walk. 

There is not on record in Oregon history a 
single case of an unfaithful Indian wife of a 
decent white man, and in view of this one 
cannot recall some particulars of the history of 
those early times without a shudder or without 
taking a firmer hold upon a l^elief in a future 
life in which the crooked ways of this world may 
be made straight, for God seemed to deal harshly 
with the Indian woman. 

The spectre of the Eve of St. John when he 
spoke to ''Smaylho'mes lady gay/' spoke to 
understanding ears, and wdien he laid his burn- 
ing fingers on her fair arm with the declaration: 

"That lawless love is guilt above, 
This awful sign receive" 

and left there the scorched brand of guilt he 
branded wanton frailty, but God's Angel of 
Punishment in his dealings with many Indian 
women laid his hand on innocent victims and 
no law protected them, no voice warned them, 
and they did not even know for what they were 
stricken. 

It is difficult for the white men and women of 
this day to conceive of the Indian code of morals 
or to appreciate how perfectly it fitted their 



THE SINS OF THE FATHERS 57 

wandering life or to understand how trustfully 
and innocently the young Indian woman met 
the Avhite strangers when they came. No ex- 
ploring or hunting party, however difficult or 
arduous the journey, ever lacked Indian w^omen 
to go with it, and no white man had any diffi- 
culty at any time in obtaining a companion 
for his camp or home, nor from the Indian 
point of view was there anything indelicate or 
immoral in this. It was the old custom of their 
race come down unquestioned from Adam and 
Eve and had the full sanction of parents and 
friends. Nevertheless to this trustfulness and 
innocence the terriljle physical punishment that 
had been evolved for a race of men who had been 
educated for centuries was ruthlessly applied, and 
to make the situation still more unhappy and 
apparently unjust no remedial or palliative 
agencies were known to the victims. The cruel 
thing about the early history of Oregon was 
that the trader came so long before the mission- 
ary that death's work was largely done to the 
Indian woman before either knowledge or help 
could come to her. 

One of the saddest sights of early days was 
that of young Indian women driven out of the 
lodges to live or die as best they could alone in 
the woods. The other Indians would be fright- 



58 CATHLAMET 

ened at their sickness and in their fear knew no 
pity. Occasionally an old woman or grand- 
mother, whose life was considered of little value 
either to herself or her people, would go out 
with the stricken one and care for her. 

Such girls would patiently live apart in some 
little hut or wickie-up and without a word of 
complaint would care for themselves as they 
best could. The pioneer white women were in 
the habit of taking out food and such simple 
remedies as they could think of to these ])oor 
creatures, and not knowing the nature of their 
illness or daring to come close to them, would 
place it upon a convenient stump to which the 
sick girl would come when her friend had with- 
drawn a little, and then the two would cheer- 
fully visit together with ten or twenty yards of 
pure air between them. 

Ordinarily, when white persons were about, 
when death came, the dead were decently buried, 
but occasionally the interment was as fearful 
as the sickness, and this was true of the victims 
of any disease that the Indian feared was in- 
fectious. 

One Winter evening a good old missionary 
telling in reflective mood his experiences on the 
Northern Coasts in a smallpox epidemic, told of 
sending Kathla a young Indian girl who had con- 



THE SINS OF THE FATHERS 59 

tracted the disease to a hut far outside the 
Indian village on a point in the bay where her 
old grandmother went with her as nurse, and 
how every morning he went in his canoe to a 
point of tide-washed rocks near their hut, and 
not daring on account of his people to go nearer, 
shouted out his instructions and left there their 
food and simple remedies, and then the missionary 
wandered off in his story into a general descrip- 
tion of that awful time, how twelve canoes laden 
with Indians seeking help camped on an island 
in the bay and after some weeks only one canoe 
went paddling away, and how, when the scourge 
had passed he sent out trusty men immune to 
the sickness and bid them bury the dead who 
were lying about in the forest with orders after- 
wards to destroy their own clothing and go 
a-hunting for six months longer before returning 
to the village, so as not to bring the infection 
back with them, and then he told of one old 
Indian who had contracted the smallpox and 
who insisted upon having his grave dug in 
advance and his bed placed over it so that he 
could drop handily into it when he died, and 
added, chuckling, that the old Indian did not 
die after all and the grave was wasted, and 
then he lapsed into silence, forgetting that he 



60 CATHLAMET 

had left Kathla's story incomplete until some 
one asked about it. 

With an effort of the memory recalling the 
circumstances the good man answered as if it 
were an ordinary occurrence of those old days: 

"Kathla and her grandmother, poor creatures! 
Oh, the wolves took them!" 

This is the seamy side of Indian life and the 
process of extinction of the Indian was grim in 
spots, but strange as it may seem, this period 
of fifty or one hundred years during which the 
natives of the Lower Columbia were passing away, 
was not on the whole an unhappy time for them. 
The Indian took life day by day and did not 
worry for the future. Sheltered and with enough 
clothes and food he was happy. The individual 
was never seriously sick but once. The life 
and the medical system insured this and the 
fear of death was not in them. 

One of the most pathetic characteristics of 
all the Indians on the Pacific Coast was their 
submission to what seemed the inevitable. A 
sick Indian gave up at once and died with no 
more fear or apparent suffering than if he were 
falling asleep, and his relatives buried him with 
low wailings, the sorrow of which died out with 
the echo. 

To this day in Alaska the dying Indian 
will talk of his own coming death with a gentle 
])atience that seems to cast out all fear. 



XI. 

THE BROKEN TRIBES 

ONE of the effects of this earlier decimation 
of the people was a scattering of all of 
the Indians of the Lower Columbia River Valley. 
They fled from their homes and temporarily 
settled in any place that provided them with 
the means of livelihood or that promised exemp- 
tion from the plague that afflicted them. In 
this wa}^ the Cathlamets, whose home was 
originally upon the Oregon side of the Columbia 
River, below Puget Island, after wanderings 
that are not recorded, finally settled upon the 
present site of Cathlamet and near the place 
of the ancient Indian town, and from this people 
the modern town derives its name. 

The Wahkiakums, who lived in the ancient 
Indian village on the Elokom^on Slough, near 
Cathlamet, returned to the ancient townsite 
after the panic was over, but only to leave 
it shortly after the coming of the Lewis and 
Clark expedition. This people gave their name 
to the County of Wahkiakum, within which 
Cathlamet is situated. What final catastrophe 



62 CATHLAMET 

compelled the Wahkiakiims to leave their 
ancient village is not known, but charred 
timbers and burned and blackened soil on the 
site of the old town point almost certainly 
to fire as the final scourge of the Indians on the 
Elokomon Slough. 

These fragments of the Wahkiakum and 
Cathlamet peoples took up their homes together 
on the main Columbia River about one mile 
East of the old Indian village. Here they l)uilt 
their cedar houses and founded what is now 
the modern village of Cathlamet. 

What took place near Cathlamet must have 
taken place all over Western Oregon. Panic- 
stricken for the time the native people wan- 
dered about for several years, and fragments 
only of the ancient tribes returned to their old 
seats. 

With this dispersion came an almost total 
disappearance of the tril)al l^onds and relation- 
ships. Every little settlement became a law 
to itself, and in Western Oregon there were no 
sharply defined tribal ties or boundaries. These 
peoples, as the white men came in, were gradu- 
ally given the names of the localities in which 
they were found, or, as often happened, the 
locality was given the name of the principal 
Indian man who was found there, and afterwards 



THE BROKEN TRIBES 63 

the resident people were known hy the same 
name. Thus Wahkiakum was a chief of the 
Cathlamets, and yet two tribes have apparently 
derived their names, one from the chief and one 
from the locality. These two tribes came to- 
gether, and the double name, Wahkiakum- 
Cathlamet, is now perpetuated in the modern 
County of Wahkiakum and Village of Cathlamet. 
The building up of Indian names for modern 
use was a wondrous process, and no man knows 
just how it was done. 

The Chinooks, Clatsops, Cathlamet-Wahkia- 
kums, and Coweliskies, with the native people 
of the Lower Willamette Valley, in this later 
period, roamed up and down the Columbia and 
Willamette Rivers between the Cascades of 
the Columbia and the Falls of the Willamette 
on the East, and the ocean on the West, and 
individuals of any tribe took up their residence 
at any place that pleased them, and in this way 
a good deal of mingling of the Indians took 
place. 

With this dispersion of the Indians came an 
absolute failure in chieftainship. From 1800 
on to the end it is remarkable how barren the 
lower river was of chiefs. 

Comcomly, of the Chinooks; Chenamus, of 
the Clatsops; Wahkiakum, of the Cathlamets, 



64 CATHLAMET 

and Umtiix, of the Coweliskies, are the only four 
borne in remembrance, and of these Wahkiakum 
is known from a line or two in Washington 
Irving and as the founder of Cathlamet, while 
Umtux emerges from obscurity only by reason 
of his tragical end at the battle-ground back 
of Fort Vancouver during the Indian war of 
1855-56. 

Comcomly was more nearly a chief than any 
other Indian on the Columbia West of the 
Cascades, and this Duncan McDougall recog- 
nized in 1813 when he married one of his daugh- 
ters. Many other Indians are named as chiefs 
in the books, and some of them may have had 
some claim to the title, but early historians 
called any principal man of the natives a chief. 
In fact, from the time of Cartier's voyage, in 
1535, when a quaint old historian, wTiting of 
the Indian town of Hochelaga, on the St. 
LawTence, speaks of meeting an Indian, ''one 
of the principal lords of the said city," to 1608, 
when in the Long Wigwam of Wesowocomoco, 
the mighty Emperor Powhattan,was divested 
of his greasv raccoon robe and gowned and 
crowned in kingly style by the English, up to 
the present time, very erroneous ideas have pre- 
vailed in regard to the power and authority of 
Indian chiefs. In time of war they were allowed 



THE BROKEN TRIBES 65 

a little authority, but not much. In Eastern 
Oregon, where chiefs were plenty, they were 
without authority in time of peace, beyond the 
influence of their personal wealth and character, 
and on the lower river the villages were without 
law or authority from any native source. 

During the latter days of Indian Cathlamet, 
Quillis was the principal man of the village, 
and had the largest lodge and family, and in 
earlier times would have been called a chief, 
but poor Quillis sciuabbled and scrambled with 
his brother Indians on terms of perfect equality, 
and if a canoe was to be hired or any contract 
made, his word was no better than that of anyone 
else. 



XII. 

THE WHITE CHIEFS 

WHILE this confusion was at its height a new 
element came in, so wedded to the Indian 
life that it became part and parcel of it, and 
lived and died with it. 

When in 1670 the ''Governor and Company 
of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's 
Bay/' commenced to trade as the Hudson's 
Bay Company with North America, they had 
no purpose of founding a dynasty, and yet 
that is what they did : the dynasty of the chiefs 
of the Indian people. 

Good old Dr. John McLoughlin, at Van- 
couver, was in all essential things a chief 
of the Indian people. His authorit}^ on the 
Columljia West of the Cascades was abso- 
lute, and it extended with varying power over 
the entire region North of California and West 
of the Rocky Mountains. His word was law 
to a lawless people, and the great chief was 
known as such among all the Indians. He 
had all the characteristics of a chief — a quick 
temper, an arl)itrary will and the heart and the 



THE WHITE CHIEFS 67 

head of a governor of men. He lived in im- 
pressive pomp, and all down the river the story 
of the stately halls and the wealth and mag- 
nificence of Fort Vancouver was told by Indian 
to Indian with bated beath. The present 
generation can never fully realize that Fort 
Vancouver was once in this Northwest country 
the court of a King, and that poor Indians wan- 
dering chieftainless and alone looked to it as a 
center of power, culture and wealth. In the 
lodges of Cathlamet, Indian mothers told their 
children of the wonderful place and of the wealth 
of red blankets, of gay silk handkerchiefs and 
of powder and shot and provisions that were 
to be found in its storehouses. 

The affection and respect of the Indians for 
McLoughlin was quickened by the fact of his 
having a wife of the Indian blood, who bore 
herself in her relations to her husband and 
the world as the wife of an Indian chieftain 
should. How much of the blood of this good 
woman was French or Scottish and how 
much Ojibway Indian nobody knows, but 
she carried herself as an Indian woman, 
and when visitors were at Fort Vancouver, 
effaced herself in true Indian fashion; loved and 
respected of her husband and of every one, she, 
according to common report, never presumed 



68 CATHLAMET 

at Fort Vancouver to sit at her husband's table 
in the presence of strangers, and in this, accord- 
ing to Indian notions, was only rendering due 
respect to her lord and master. 

No requirement of Indian etiquette was more 
imperative than this, that an Indian woman 
should not be seen eating with her husband. 
It was her duty to wait upon and serve him, and 
afterwards provide for herself. It made no 
difference how wealthy she was, or how many 
servants she might have to wait upon her, she 
never presumed to put herself upon an equality 
with her husband or to be served before him. 
This was not an invariable rule, as more than 
one Indian woman took her place at the head 
of her white husband^s table and there welcomed 
his guests, but this was not common and was 
generally confined to Indian women married 
from tribes East of the Rocky Mountains. 

There are wives of the Indian blood now living 
on the Lower Columbia whose hus])ands are 
well-to-do, influential men, who are loved and 
respected of their husl^ands, who have the re- 
spect of the conununities in which they are 
known, and who live handsomely and well, yet 
who will not to this day sit at their own bounti- 



THE WHITE CHIEFS 69 

fill and well-appointed tables with their husband 
and his guests. This native shyness and reserve 
it is almost impossible for the native women to 
give up, and it enhanced Dr. McLoughlin's dig- 
nity in the eyes of the natives that his wife treat- 
ed him as a chief. 



XIII. 
INDIAN WIVES 

THE relation of the white chiefs of the 
Hudson's Bay Company with native women 
presents a point of vivid interest in Indian his- 
tory. For twenty years Fort Vancouver, like all 
other Hudson's Bay posts, was the home of fair- 
faced men and dark-faced women. There is no 
doubt as to the standing of the women. The}^ 
had been wedded in the ancient and orderly 
fashion of their people and in the forum of con- 
science were as much married as ever Queen 
Victoria was. They knew that their husbands 
could dismiss them at any time, but this was 
the ancient and inalienable right of the husband 
according to Indian ideas, and so without a 
thought or care for the future they gladly 
gave themselves to their white masters and 
made loving and dutiful wives, and being used 
to the country and at home, made very effective 
helpmeets. The men accepted them upon the 
same terms and not one man in ten dreamed at 
first of the relation becoming a permanent one. 
They were not of the class of the settlers, and 

70 



INDIAN WIVES 71 

each man expected in due time to return to 
England and there marry and found a family. 
Some of them did dismiss their Indian wives. 
There were two ways of doing this. One was 
to pass the wife, often with a bonus of goods or 
furs, over to some other white man; and this, 
although a cruel process, was much more merci- 
ful than the other, which was to send the woman 
back to her own people. No one w^ho has ever 
seen an Indian wife of a white man sent back to 
her people ever wanted to see such a thing again. 
Sorrowfully gathering up her little belongings, 
lingering over the task as long as possible, the 
poor dumb creature would finally come to the 
last parting. Without outcry or struggle she 
would try to accept her fate. One or two good- 
bye kisses, for the Indian women under the 
training of the white men soon learned to kiss, 
and then with her little bundles she would make 
her way back to the lodges. For days and weeks 
she would bring little gifts of berries and game 
and lay them on her husband's doorstep, and 
for days and weeks would haunt the trading 
post or humbly stand near her husband's house, 
where he could see her, not daring to ask to be 
taken back, only hoping that his mood might 
change and that she might again be restored to 
her old place. Resolute men broke down under 



72 CATHLAMET 

the strain of such partings and took back their 
dusky wives for better or for worse until death 
should them part. 

With the higher class of Hudson's Bay man 
the original marriage relation was very rarely 
dissolved. Little by little the light shone in 
upon him. Seeing at last clearly what he had 
done and strengthened by love of wdfe and chil- 
dren after many soul struggles, he faced his 
duty nobly, and calling in the minister took 
upon himself the marriage vows that bound 
him as w^ell as the woman. 

Dr. McLoughlin w^as married after the English 
fashion in 1836, eleven years after he and his 
wife had come to Fort Vancouver. Sir James 
Douglas was married at the same time, while 
another prominent Hudson Ba}^ man and his 
wdfe were joined together in the white man's 
fashion by the same minister that married their 
daughter to her husband and at the same time. 

Romance treats it lightly, but whole tragedies 
of self-renunciation w^ere bound up in many of 
these marriages. 

Before McLoughlin came to Oregon another 
servant of the Hudson's Bay Company had 
been exercising all the functions and authority 
of a chief of the Lidians. James Birnie was in 
every respect an interesting character, and had 



INDIAN WIVES 73 

great influence with the Indians of the Cokimbia 
River, and from 1846 to his death in 1864 he 
lived and with his wife reigned at Cathlamet. 
He connected himself with the Hudson's Bay 
Company at Montreal, and three years later, in 
1820, established a Hudson's Bay Company post 
at The Dalles. He was at Fort Simpson in 
British Columbia, where one of the islands out- 
side the harbor now bears his name, and after- 
wards was in charge of Fort George, now Astoria, 
at the mouth of the Columbia River. In 1846 
he severed his connection with the Hudson's 
Bay Company and settled in Cathlamet, the first 
white man to make a home there. Here he and 
his wife ruled in state and conducted what was 
in all essential particulars a post of the Hudson's 
Bay Company. The square Hudson's Bay store 
just east of the present steamboat landing at 
Cathlamet still stands. At least it is in the 
same position and is of the same shape, but 
clapboards and paint have given it a modern 
appearance. The old Birnie house was on the 
crest of the hill just back of the store. Like 
McLoughlin, Mr. Birnie had an Indian wife, 
brought w^ith him from the Red River Indians 
of the East; but she, unlike Mrs. McLoughlin, 
bore herself with all the self-assertion of an Eng- 
lish dame of long pedigree. She entertained 



74 CATHLAMET 

in her own home and sat at the head of her 
own table, and no social center in those days in 
all the country was more fashionably attended 
than that of Mrs. Birnie. Once only in the year 
did she resume her Indian character, and that 
was for her annual trip to Shoalwater Bay for 
elk meat, clams and cranberries. 

Mrs. Birnie 's canoe was one of the w^onders 
of the lower river. * No larger one in the memory 
of Indians had ever been seen there. It was 
said that it could carry seventy people. In 
the fall of the year this canoe, manned 
by twenty or thirty Indian men and women, 
with all their belongings and household 
furniture aboard, w^ould start seaward from 
Cathlamet. Mrs. Birnie, all fire and energy, 
would be in command, and no woman on the 
river could command better. To the dip of the 
paddles and the Indian chant, the big canoe, 
enforcing respect everywhere, would pass the 
Chinook villages into Chinook River to the 
portage. Here the expedition would be taken 
over to the Nasel River and from there w^ould 
pass into Shoalwater Bay. After a few weeks of 
hunting and fishing the party, with its spoils, 
would return by the same route. Disposing 
of her gatherings and scattering her party, Mrs. 
Birnie would doff her Indian character and again 



INDIAN WIVES 75 

assume her role as the grand dame of Birnie 
hall. 

Here was one of the great gathering places 
of the lower river, and here at the wedding of 
Mrs. Birnie's daughters were gathered imposing 
assemblies. Thomas Fielding Scott, first rnis- 
sionary bishop of Oregon, an imposing figure in 
full canonicals, performed the marriage cere- 
monies. The Indians looked on in awe and 
amiazement, and for weeks afterwards the little 
Indians gave dress rehearsals of the white man's 
wedding. The white robes of the bishop, which 
in their untutored way they took to be a glorified 
nightgown or white blanket in some way pecul- 
iarly appropriate for weddings, particularly took 
their fancy. To see a dirty little brat of an Indian 
with a piece of old cloth on, through rents in 
which gleamed a brown little stomach, attempt 
to repeat the marriage ceremony to a couple 
of other little brats, was very funny. 



XIV. 
KEEPING THE PEACE 

NEITHER Mr. Birnie nor any of the Hudson 
Bay employees had any legal authority 
over the Indians; law in these very early days 
was chiefly conspicuous for its absence, but each 
and every one of them fearlessly assumed the 
duty of a chief bound to maintain order within 
the bounds of his jurisdiction. Occasionally Dr. 
McLoughlin would have an Indian murderer 
hanged, and he never permitted any serious 
offense to go unpunished, but severe measures 
were rarely necessary. 

Occasionally a naval expedition was sent out, 
but these on the lower river were not very 
destructive. George B. Roberts, Dr. McLough- 
lin's Prime Minister at Vancouver, who in the 
latter part of his life lived and finally died at 
Cathlamet, and who knew more of affairs at 
Vancouver and of the Indians than almost any 
one else, had many comical tales to tell of these 
expeditions. The irate old doctor would storm 
about and order the instant punishment of the 
offending Chinooks. If the armed schooner 

76 



KEEPING THE PEACE 11 

Cadboro was away another little schooner would 
be hauled to the bank and a big gun would with 
infinite difficulty be transferred from the fort 
to her deck, where it would be carefully balanced 
to prevent an upset. Then in charge of a flotilla 
of canoes the schooner with the great black 
gun looming up impressively on the forward 
deck would jDroceed down the river to the great 
awe and astonishment of all the Indians until 
opposite the Chinook town, where she would 
come to anchor. After allowing a sufficient 
time for every Chinook to get well away the 
big gun would be carefully trained upon a spot 
where good old Roberts thought there was no 
danger of hitting anybody and fired several 
times. A few houses would be knocked down 
and a few canoes would be captured. The 
Indians w^ould make restitution and the principal 
offenders would receive some slight punishment. 
Then Dr. McLoughlin and Birnie and Roberts 
and the others would be again indulgent chiefs 
of their weak and erring people, and the Hudson's 
Bay Company would again enfold them with 
its protection. The schooner victorious, big 
gun and all, would sail up the river amidst great 
rejoicing and promptly resume its peaceful 
business of carrying goods and furs. 

The chief instrument of discipline was the 



78 CATHLAMET 

store, for here every Indian was well known, 
and he could trade to such extent only as the 
factor allowed. If for any reason he was on the 
black list for offenses unatoned for it made no 
difference how many beaver skins he could pro- 
duce. There was no sugar or tobacco, powder, 
shot or blankets for him. In serious cases the 
store would be entirely closed to the whole people 
and this would bring the most stubborn tribe 
to its knees, for without powder and shot they 
were helpless, and without sugar and tobacco 
they were miserable. All hunting and fishing 
would stop, and about the storehouse would 
be gathered, stolid but unhappy groups of Indian 
men and women squatting on the ground and 
discussing the situation. 

Finally a subdued and repentant committee 
of the principal men would wait upon the offended 
factor. They would be received with severe and 
impressive dignity, would very likely be kept 
waiting for several days for an interview with 
the chief. When admitted to his presence their 
business would be curtly and sternly demanded 
of them. Then a great silence would prevail 
not a word would be said perhaps for half an 
hour or more. Finally a principal man would 
rise in his place and mournfully lay before the 
factor the unhappy condition of his people, 



KEEPING THE PEACE 79 

carefully refraining from mentioning what he 
and the factor and everybody else knew was 
the secret of the whole trouble. Then the factor 
upon his part would curtly tell them what they 
all very well knew, that at such a time and place 
a white trapper had. been robbed of his furs and 
outfit, and that until these had been returned 
and the criminals given up for punishment his 
heart was angry towards them, and that there 
were no goods for any one until restitution had 
been made. After expressing their astonish- 
ment at the news and denying all knowledge of 
the affair and any ability to detect or bring in 
the offenders, the Indian committee would 
slowly stalk out, and the groups about the store 
would begin again their subdued conversations. 

After a clay or two some of the plundered 
goods would be returned. The factor would 
be obdurate. Then more would come in. Still 
the factor shook his head. After awhile all 
would be returned and the solemn committee 
would ask for mercy, and would plaintively 
tell that the robbers were of another tribe; that 
they had gone to a far-off illihee, etc., etc., but 
all in vain. 

After a few days more Indian Jim and Indian 
Joe and their associates would be produced as 
the culprits. In nearly every case the offenders 



80 CATHLAMET 

would surrender themselves to justice when the 
pressure on their people became sufficiently 
hard, but if not they were brought in by force. 

Indians acted very much as children do, and 
one of their peculiarities was that a criminal 
seemed unable to keep silent regarding his crime, 
and however disasti'ous the consequences might 
be to himself, was compelled to confess and give 
himself up. 

As one by one the Hudson's Bay Company 
gave up its posts the men who were foot loose 
returned to English soil, but many were not 
so free. Dr. McLoughlin and James Birnie, 
hapi^y in their married life, were nevertheless 
not in a position to return home, and were com- 
pelled to stay in the wilderness with their wilder- 
ness people, and this was true of hundreds of 
others. Ties carelessly assumed at first, in the 
end held these men captives 1)}^ a chain that they 
could not and w^ould not break. 

Already men and women are proud of the 
Indian blood in their veins, and more and 
more this feeling will grow, but at this early 
time the Indian wife could only be happy 
in her native land, and was unfitted for any 
other; and it speaks well for the great hearts 
of these noble men that they recognized this 
and gave themselves a willing sacrifice to a 



KEEPING THE PEACE 81 

new country and a dying race. They had con- 
nected themselves with a changing time and were 
compelled to change and pass away with it. 

The clinging arms of the wilderness women 
were about them and held them to their forest 
life. There they lived and there they died, 
and the God of the wilderness has pronounced 
their work good. 



XV. 
CHIEF UMTUX 

MENTION has been made of the peaceful 
character of the Indians along the Lower 
Columbia and their broken strength. It is a fact, 
therefore, to be noticed that after Fort Vancou- 
ver came into the possession of the Americans a 
number of these Indians did on one occasion form 
line of battle against the whites and that by rea- 
son of what then happened one spot in the Lower 
Columbia River Valley bears to this day the title 
of a battle ground. 

The Coweliskies who lived on the Cowlitz 
River, then known as the Coweliskie, and 
along the two branches of the Lewis River 
in what is now known as Cowlitz and Clark 
Counties of the State of Washington, were not 
of the pure river type of Indian, nor did they live 
directly on the banks of the Columl)ia. They 
had a trail extending from the Cowlitz River 
to the gravel plains South of Olympia, Tacoma 
and Seattle. Some of them who lived near the 
Gravel Plains had ])onies and were what might 
be called half horse and half canoe Indians, 

8? 



CHIEF UMTUX 83 

They were a more lively and warlike people than 
the Chinooks and held a middle position be- 
tween the Columbia River and the Puget Sound 
Indians. 

Indians are by nature great gamblers, and 
it is hard where all so excelled to specify 
any one tribe that was preeminent in this fasci- 
nating vice, but perhaps the Indians of the Lower 
Puget Sound country were entitled to this award. 
Too timorous to go to actual war and take chances 
with death, they were also too adventurous to 
be contented in mere eating and drinking, and 
therefore gambled with an abandon that put to 
shame the very best modern efforts of our gilded 
youth. The white man plays to some limit, 
but these Indians had none. Whenever any 
of these Indian communities on Puget Sound 
acquired enough portable property to make it 
worth while they sent out invitations to their 
neighbors for a meeting at some appointed 
place, and to this spot the Indians would flock 
from every point of the compass. They would 
bring with them their wives, children, dogs, 
horses, furs, robes, w^eapons and every bit of their 
property that they could carry along, leaving 
nothing at home except their canoes and lodges. 
The prominent features of these aboriginal 



84 CATHLAMET 

fairs or expositions were what might he called 
' 'agricultural horse trots.'' 

Horse racing as a gambling game was an insti- 
tution amongst them^ and every little com- 
munity of the horse Indians had its racing pony, 
which was at once its pride and hope. Other 
gambling games were played at these meetings 
but the horse race was the greatest of them all. 
Curiously enough the Indian in his native state 
never raced canoes. This is a modern invention 
of the w^hite man. 

To these race meets appointed by the Indians 
of Lower Puget Sound many of the Coweliskies 
with their wives and chattels would go, and 
generally they came back afoot without their 
chattels and sometimes without their wives. 

Upon the speed of their favorite pony the 
Indians would stake everything, robes, goods 
and horses, and, the fever of gambling upon 
them, would not hesitate to stake and lose the 
clothing from off their backs or even their faithful 
squaws. This betting of a wife upon a gaml)ling 
game was a rare event, not because of any disin- 
clination on the part of the loving husband to 
put up the wife of his bosom on a wager, but 
rather to the disinclination of the other man 
to ])ut up anything of value against such skittish 
l)roperty as Indian squaws. The Indian might 



CHIEF UMTUX 85 

be a gambler, but he wasn't always a fool, 
and to win an assorted lot of wives was not 
exactl}^ the way to get rich or happy. It was 
only in cases like that of the amorous Jewish 
King that an Indian would in a gambling game 
put up anything of value against an Indian 
woman, and had King David and his faithful 
Uriah been Columbia River Indians the wiley 
old lover would have needed only to put his 
faithful soldier in the front of a poker game 
to get his wife, and the putting of Uriah in the 
front of the battle and the shedding of blood 
would have been spared the Psalmist. 

This intercourse of the Coweliskies and the 
Puget Sound Indians naturally made them 
friendly, and when the Indian war of 1855-6 was 
in progress and Chief Les(;hi on the Sound was 
taking the Puget Sound Indians into war with 
the whites, great fear was felt on the Columbia 
River that the Coweliskies would be drawn 
into the conflict, and it was deemed best to keep 
them at Fort Vancouver, and there they were 
brought and kept in semi-imprisonment. At 
this time the regulars were in the field, and a 
company of volunteers was, greatl}^ to its dis- 
satisfaction and to the dissatisfaction of its 
Captain, in garrison at Fort Vancouver, and the 
fort was the center of more general alarms and 



86 CATHLAMET 

troubles than any other point in the Northwest. 
The Yakima Indians were attacking the 
Cascades settlement only thirty miles to the East- 
ward, and a large number of settlers had been 
killed there. General, then Lieutenant Philip 
Sheridan, with only forty men, the last of the 
regulars, had gone to the Cascades to withstand 
them, and was having a hard time. Every- 
where fear was about Vancouver and all of the 
settlers from the threatened points were en- 
camped about it for protection. 

Panics were of daily hapi)ening and it was a 
common occurrence for such a panic to arise in 
some strange way in the middle of the night. 
A cry would be raised in the darkness that the 
Indians were coming, and in a moment the 
muddy roads and trails through the dark woods 
would be thronged with the panic-stricken 
people fleeing to the fort for protection. Most 
of the men were absent at the front fighting 
Indians, but the trampling women and children 
had a hard time of it, and the few men stationed 
at the fort, and especially the young Captain, 
had almost more than they could do to keep 
order and still remain in a posture of defense 
against the ver}^ real Indian enemy only thirty 
miles away 

Amidst all of these alarms the camp of the 



CHIEF UMTUX 87 

Coweliskies lay like a dark cloud under the fort, 
portending danger, and many a mother and 
many a fighting man, looking at it with appre- 
hension, wished that it might be destroyed 
before it broke and scattered, carrying fire and 
death with it. 

While things were in this condition the 
Coweliskies suddenly decamped. In a single 
night their camp disappeared and in the morning 
the settlers saw in their fancy their worst fears 
confirmed: the Coweliskies had gone on the 
warpath and now the Indian war was to be 
brought to their own firesides. The company 
was promptly put under arms and went in pursuit 
and about fifteen miles Northwest of Vancouver 
overtook the fugitives. Great difficulty was 
found in locating them and still greater diffi- 
culty in finding out their intentions, whether 
for war or peace. To precipitate a conflict by 
striking the Indians unnecessarily would in the 
unprotected condition of the settlers have been 
a crime, while to let the Indians escape to carry 
on in unbroken force an Indian warfare would 
have been worse. 

The young Captain placed his little force 
across the path of the Indians and went to work 
to develop the situation. Negotiations were 
entered into. The two forces stood on their 



88 CATHLAMET 

guard against each other, but everything went 
well, and one evening the Indians finally prom- 
ised to return the next morning, and for the 
first time for many nights the young Captain 
had rest. In that night some lawless idiot did 
his deadly work, and the next morning it was 
learned that Umtux, the chief of the Indians, 
lay dead between the lines. Who killed him no 
one knows or suspects to this day. None of 
the sentrys fired upon him and none of his Indians 
appeared to have had murder against him in 
their hearts. Nevertheless there lay Chief Umtux 
half way between the lines of his people and the 
lines of the volunteers, indubitably very dead. 
Lying in the trail by the side of a log with the 
hole made by a rifle bullet through him, Chief 
Umtux w^as more dangerous dead than living, 
and instantly the battle lines were formed in earn- 
est and for a few hours Chief Umtux lay upon 
the crimsoned soil of what it seemed would at 
last be a genuine battle-ground of Northwestern 
Oregon. Steadily the two forces stood against 
each other, but fortunately no other shot w^as 
fired and Western Oregon was spared an Indian 
war. A brave French voyageur volunteered 
to go to the Indians and resume treaty-making, 
and taking his life in his hands stood in their 
midst. It is told that it was a dramatic scene. 



CHIEF UMTUX 89 

The Indians, half crazed with fear and lust of 
revenge, stood about him. He explained as he 
best could that the death of Umtux was not the 
act of the soldiery, but of some lawless ranger, 
and that if they would submit they would be 
protected. Gradually with perfect skill and 
fearlessness he won back their confidence and 
oljtained a renewal of their promise to go back 
to the fort. One strange thing for Indians, 
they stipulated for, and that was that the soldiers 
should return and leave them free for twenty-four 
hours to bury their chief unobserved. When this 
condition was reported to the young Captain 
he was doubtful. On the one hand it looked 
like an Indian trick to escape without a battle, 
while on the other hand their Chief had been 
unfairly killed and they had a just right to suspect 
the good faith of the white men. 

After some hours of consideration he accepted 
the solemn promise of the Indians and marched 
his men back to the fort, leaving the Cowel- 
iskies alone with their dead. Chief Umtux 
was buried that night, but how and where no 
man save his Indians ever knew, and they never 
told. IT you will look upon a map you will see 
a place about twelve or fifteen miles Northeast 
of Vancouver that bears to this day the name 



90 CATHLAMET 

of "Battle<2;round." Near here the Indians 
stood at bay, and near here Umtiix was buried. 

The death of Umtux was a direct blow at the 
peace that then prevailed between the Indians 
and the white men in Western Oregon, and his 
murder was an act of violence that disgraces the 
pioneer annals of Oregon, but there was more 
to come, and what happened afterwards shows in 
still another light the less noble side of the 
pioneer character, for the pioneer men had the 
faults of their virtues. Their boldness some- 
times became temerity, their love of liberty 
license, and their justice revenge, and the wife 
of the pioneer was like unto him. 

When the company came marching l:)ack into 
the fort without any Indians either dead or alive 
and without a battle to report, excitement ran 
high and when it became known upon what 
terms they had allowed the Indians to remain, 
the excitement increased. There could be no 
talk of lynching, because the company contained 
practically all the fighting men of the settle- 
ment, so the women with busy tongues took 
the matter into their own hands, and when the 
company were assembled appeared before it 
and in the presence of an excited crowd pre- 
sented to the Captain a woman's red petticoat 
as a l)anner for his soldiers. It was a deadly 



CHIEF UMTUX 91 

insult and the company quailed under it. For 
a moment matters looked serious, and there 
was every prospect of a general riot and a free 
fight, but the Captain was a man of parts and 
equal to the situation. With a white face he 
stepped forward and on behalf of his company 
accepted the gift. In a few manly words he 
told the women and the gaping crowd that they 
did not know what they did or appreciate the 
reason for the action of the soldiers, and assured 
them that if it should be the good fortune of the 
company to be ordered to the front that their 
flag would be carried into action, and if so carried 
w^ould be dj^ed a deeper red before it returned, 
and then turning to his company gave a short 
military command. There was some hesitation 
in obeying it, and a tall, lanky fellow made 
some insolent remark and drew a bowie knife. 
That was enough, and with joy in his heart that 
his wrath could be unloosed and that he had 
somebody besides women to expend his anger 
upon, in one bound the Captain was upon him. 
The man made one ineffectual stroke with his 
knife, and ever after one side of the Captain's 
mouth, where the knife cut in, drooped under 
his moustache a little more than the other, and 
then the man went down helpless as- a child 
in a grasp that threatened to choke out life. 



92 CATHLAMET 

The Captain always afterwards cheerfully in- 
sisted that he was only maintaining military 
discipline, and would not have killed the man, 
but the men of his company, in telling of the 
affair, claimed that they saved the fellow's life 
only by pulling the Captain off. The Captain 
stood six feet two inches in his stockings and had 
had provocation that would have angered an 
angel, so perhaps the truth was with the rank 
and file. 

The next day, true to their appointment, the 
Coweliskies came marching in and put them- 
selves under the protection of the white Captain, 
and the women with one of those swift revulsions 
of feeling that follow so fast after heedless action, 
were profuse in their apologies and wanted to 
take back their flag, besides the woman who 
had lent the petticoat wanted it back for personal 
reasons, for petticoats were short in more ways 
than one in those days, but no, the members of 
the company were obdurate. The petticoat had 
been given to them and their flag it would 
remain. 

The Coweliskies made no more trouble. The 
Indian war rolled Eastward back from the gates 
of the Cascades. The settlers went home and 
confidence was restored. Then the company 
was disbanded, taking back with it only the 



CHIEF UMTUX 93 

satisfaction of knowing that it had done its 
duty and that it had been the only military 
command of the war that had been presented 
with a banner. 

The Coweliskies in their squalor were but a 
poor and far away imitation of the angels that 
buried the great law giver, j^et their work abides, 
for of Umtux it is true ''that no man knoweth 
of his sepulchre unto this day." 



XVL 

HAPPY DAYS 

rjlHERE were few more joyful or animated 
-^ sights than a lodge or hunting party of 
Indians in good luck. The Indian bucks sitting 
around smoking or gambling, the Indian women 
busy in preserving fish and meat and preparing 
skins, and the funny little children and the dogs, 
a mingled, whooping, joyful mass, eating, sleep- 
ing and playing all day long. Even the little 
baby wdth his tightly bound head and body 
strapped to a board hung up against a tree, 
looked around with his little beady eyes in 
contented amusement, and unless frightened 
never cried. 

Amongst themselves or with their intimate 
friends they w^ere not at all reserved, but joked 
and told stories with the utmost freedom. 
Many of these stories, told in the ()})en lodge 
before the women and children, would not bear 
repeating, could not well pass inspection for 
the Government mail. 

As the lingering remnant of this people 
approached the end, on one conspicuous occasion 

94 



HAPPY DAYS 95 

Providence threw a broad gleam of sunshine 
over their path and made all of them rich beyond 
the utmost dreams of Indian avarice. In 1861 
came a day when the snows gathered and 
the rains fell. The Clackamas, Molalla, San- 
tiam, and McKenzie, the Long Tom, Rickreall, 
Yamhill and Tualatin poured their crowded 
waters into the Willamette River and swept it 
with a great flood from end to end. Linn City, 
opposite Oregon City, was swept away to the 
bedrock, and flouring mills, saw mills, ware- 
houses, wharves, stores and houses from all 
along the river went floating to the sea in a mass. 
The Columbia River at Cathlamet was covered 
for days with lumber, flour, furniture and prop- 
ert}^ of every description, and the tides there 
made salvage easy. Every Indian and every 
canoe along the river was busy. Flour was 
the principal thing saved. This wets in only 
about half an inch, and remains just as good as 
ever inside. In front of the Quillis lodge was 
ranged a great pile of flour sacks, food enough 
for years. Lumber was brought ashore in any 
c{uantity that was wanted. The Indians even 
tied up a whole wharf and warehouse in one of 
the sloughs below the town. They saved fur- 
niture and clothing and crockery, everything 
that an Indian could ask for. Incalculable 



96 CATHLAMET 

wealth rolled along for days on the river and 
the Indians were free to pick and choose. The 
little Indians whooped along the bank with their 
loose, single shirt half the time over their heads 
and never covering their nakedness. 

''Nanich! nanich!" (see! see!) they shouted, 
and '^Hiyu supalil! hiyu supalil!" (plenty bread! 
plenty bread!) dancing up and down in their 
excitement and occasionall}^ making a wild 
plunge towards the river to save some article 
that floated near shore, occasionally, too, falling 
in and being pulled out and slappedH^y the 
watchful, excited mothers. 

It was almost incredible what came down 
the river. There was no rattlesnake country 
within 150 miles, and yet an old log house came 
floating by alive with rattlesnakes. Bales of 
hay floated by with crowing chickens. One 
young Indian attracted by the neat look of 
some white painted beehives that came floating 
by on the platform of an old outhouse, took 
one aboard his canoe. A moment after he 
went howling overboard, and when he was 
pulled ashore and emptied of the water that 
had poured into him, expressed his opinion 
of the white people who put up hornets in white 
boxes in unvarnished terms. "Hiyu Mesatchie," 
and then, as the Indian vocabulary failed, ''D — n 



HAPPY DAYS 97 

Mesatchie." As for the beehive and the canoe, 
they went saiUng out over the bar, and so far as 
any one knows, these bees are the same ones 
that are now^ making the beeswax that washes 
up every now and then from the Pacific Ocean. 
It was a gorgeous time, and when the flood of 
wealth was over the Indians of the lower river 
were richer than they had ever been even in 
their dreams. 

To Quillis and his people, however, the 
inquiry that suggested itself to the sportsmen 
who found four pounds of bread and ten gallons 
of wdiisky in their camp luggage soon suggested 
itself, ''What did they want so much bread for?" 
A lot of flour was promptly exchanged for a 
sixty-gallon barrel of whisky, and Ingersoll never 
sang the song of the oaken barrel half as joyously 
as the Indians did. It was the last great feast 
of the Columbia River Indians. Only one 
thing marred its joyousness and this was tem- 
porary. Old Quillis was a wise old chap, and 
as the whisky brightened up his intellect it 
occurred to him that the barrel of whisky would 
last one Indian longer than it would the tribe, 
so he quietly stole the half empty cask and hid 
it in the woods, but Quillis sober could not 
find what Quillis drunk had hidden, so after a 
week of antics that alarmed the rest of his 



98 CATHLAMET 

tribe as to his sanity, Quillis called his pe()])le 
together and confessed his sin and begged their 
help in finding the precious barrel. After a 
long search enthusiastically joined in by all the 
Indians the barrel was found and the interrupted 
feast went on. 

Gradually the race died out, happy in the 
Indian fashion, and care-free to the last, and 
the survi^'ors in the Willamette Valley and the 
Valley of the Columbia can now almost be 
counted on the fingers. They did not pass away 
unnoticed or alone. Other powers and noted 
men tied to them in the wel) of fate passed away 
with them. Great captains of the imperial 
race sat in their lodges, and a President, to be, 
of the United States, traveled in somewhat 
sorry state in their canoes, in those last few 
years. 



XVIT. 

THE PIONEERS 

NO PICTURE of the Western Indian can 
be complete without reference to the 
race that supplanted him and the circumstances 
of the contact of the two races so long as it 
existed. 

Shuffle Shoon and Amber Locks 
Sit together building blocks. 
Shuffle Shoon is old and gray, 
Amber Locks a little child. 

One speaks of the long ago, 
Where his dead hopes buried lie. 
One with chubby cheeks aglow, 
Prattleth of the By and By. 

In 1850 there were probably not to exceed 
one thousand white men in all the vast district 
lying North of the Columbia River. The Willam- 
ette A'alley South of the Columbia, was compara- 
tively vrell settled with white people, but from 
Cathlamet Northward for thousands of miles 
the wilderness lay unmarked by white men's 
hands. A few hamlets on Puget Sound, a 



100 CATHLAMET 

house at CathlaiiK^t, another at Oak Point and 
a few others here and there, witli Fort X'ancouver, 
was alL 

Cathlamet was one of the lonehest places 
on the earth. Into its loneHness in 1850 
came a white pioneer and his wife, with two 
little babies. A trail through the woods was 
made to the point on the river about a cpuirter 
of a mile below Mr. Birnie's, and here a small 
log house was built and occupied. 

It is hard to conceive of the iminilse or instinct 
that brought two such people into such a 
situation. The man was a trained lawyer, as 
after events made clear, one of the highest 
types of his ])rofession. Even before he left the 
East his al)ilities were recognized, and he stood 
on equal terms with men wdio in the stirring 
events of the next ten years were to earn world- 
wide fame. He was a man of culture and re- 
finement. At a time when college graduates 
were rarer than they are now, he w^as a graduate 
of Yale College, and always bore about him the 
evidence of his training. Oreek was familiar 
to him, and Latin he could read to the end of 
his days almost as readily as he could English. 
Not only college bred, Init a man of wide and 
choice reading, he made a strange selection of 
a place for the exercise of his undoubted talents 



THE PIONEERS 101 

and capabilities, but, strange as was his choice 
of a home, it was a still more strange home for 
his wife, who for some years was the onl}^ white 
woman of Cathlamet. 

A refined and cultivated young woman, thor- 
oughly educated and accustomed to the best 
social circles of the Eastern States, with two 
little babies, was somewhat out of place in the 
Cathlamet of 1850. The pioneer instinct is 
one of the strangest instincts of a virile race, 
and no stranger manifestation of it ever appeared 
than this. In the Winter nights the wolves 
howled within hearing of the little log house, 
and the young women of today, fearful of a 
mouse, would not have thought it a cheerful 
sound. With wolves on one side and an Indian 
village on the other, the bravest of women might 
have felt a little timid. 

The first few years at Cathlamet were years 
of hardship for this white family. The duties 
of the man compelled him to be away from 
home at Oregon City, Salem and other points 
a great portion of the time, and his wife was 
left alone with her children. 

His income was ridiculously small, and was 
almost consumed in traveling and similar ex- 
penses, so that the improvement of the place 
grew very slowly, and household comforts were 



102 CATHLAMET 

not to ])o had, and the surroundings made the 
youno- wife's position a very hard one. 

One of the peculiarities of Indian life is the 
little apparent effect that an Indian village has 
upon wild animals in its proximity. The large 
gray wolf, the most knowing and elusive of 
animals, will loiter around the outskirts of an 
Indian village, and upon occasions will come into 
it almost as fearlessly as the native dogs. It 
may be that the wolfish nature of the Indian dogs 
invites such familiarity, but there is no love 
lost l:>etween the wolf and the dog, and it is not 
unconmion for the wolves to kill and eat their 
dog brethren. In Metlakahtla, a large Indian 
village of eight hundred people, on Annette 
Island, in Alaska, two years ago, large gray wolves 
came, even in summer nights, into the heart of 
the town, and the shadowy gray creatures were 
frequently met with on the streets. Wolves 
would not have come within five miles of a town 
of equal size of white people. 

Wild animals fairly swarmed al)out Cathlamet. 

Every now and then a choice duck of the 
tame fiock would l)e heard squawking loudly 
and seen ])rogressing across the sloughs in a 
direction in which he evidently did not want to 
go. A cunning little mink had seized him from 
l)elow and was towing him off. Not a sign of 



THE PIONEERS 103 

the mink could be seen, and when anybody shot 
at the sorrowful procession they generally killed 
the duck, and the mink went free. 

The family pig, upon which was centered many 
hopes, would be feeding in a little pasture near 
the house, when a great hulking bear would come 
rolling over the fence and little piggy; with a 
frantic squeal issuing from one end of him, and 
his curly tail twisting frantically from the other, 
would disappear in the dark woods, never to 
be heard of more. 

The cougars took toll from the dozens or so 
of sheep that were kept, and would come into 
the very corrals for that purpose. 

As if this were not enough, the Indian dogs 
took a hand in the sport and worried the sheep 
whenever they could, and nothing would persuade 
the Indians to reduce the number of their canine 
pests. The white men formed an impromptu 
protective association, and shot the dogs when- 
ever they could catch them, until the dogs learned 
the trick of running into the lodges whenever 
they saw a white man around with a gun. This 
protected them for some time, until the sheep 
were nearly gone, when something had to be 
done, and then one of the white men with a rifle 
in one hand for emergencies, and a Colt's revolver 
in the other for dogs, boldly went into the lodges 



104 CATHLAMET 

and shot tlio dogs there. It was risky work. 
The inside of the lodge was all smoke and con- 
fusion, and the children and the Indians hid 
the dogs in the beds, but canine curiosity was too 
strong, and every now and then a dog would 
stick his head out and bark. Crack would go 
the revolver, half a dozen more dogs would break 
out sinudtaneously, and it would be bow-wow, 
crack, crack, until the revolver was empty. 
In this way the dog pest was kept down and 
the sheep were given some chance for their 
lives. There was naturally a very limited 
market, and not much variety in food, and salt 
salmon and potatoes grew tiresome. The only 
thing that made living possible was that wild 
game was abundant and chea]). A few charges 
of gunpowder and shot would buy a fine wild 
duck or goose, a single charge of gunpowder 
would bu}' a forty-pound salmon, and an Indian 
would sometimes come in with his one-man 
canoe loaded with wild fowl, which he would 
sell for anything the white people would give 
for them. 

The family grew larger, and as children were 
born to Mrs. Birnie and the young white wife, 
the white woman and the red would minister at 
each other's ])edsides like sisters, and the friend- 



THE PIONEERS 105 

ships so formed never failed or changed so long 
as the two women lived. 

Occasionally some relief came to the monotony. 
In 1853 a visit was made to Fort Vancouver, 
nearly a hundred miles away. To save expense 
the traveling w^as done in a canoe, with an 
Indian crew, and as a baby six months old 
was a necessary passenger on the journey, it 
will be seen how anxious this white woman was 
to see and talk with her own people again. 

During all of this time at Cathlamet the Indians 
looked to the white w^oman for help in every 
time of trouble. Was a native baby sick the 
white mother must know some remedy; was 
any Indian hurt the white woman in the absence 
of the white man must do the necessary surgical 
work. It was one continual demand, and the 
back porch of the house was lined with Indians 
almost every morning with olallies (berries) 
to sell, w^ith ducks or geese to dispose of, or 
with some tale of woe or sickness to tell. Gen- 
erally one or two Indian women were about the 
house helping in some capacity, and their rela- 
tives would visit them as often as they were 
allowed. Indian women visiting were not 
enlivening creatures. Coming in ciuieth^ with 
a hardly articulate ''klowhiam" or good morning, 
they would stand around, saying nothing. 



1()() CATHLAMET 

Wh(Mi ))ross('(l to stay, they would look about. 
chatter a little among themselves, and then 
carefully avoiding the chairs, would curl their 
legs under them and squat down on the floor. 
Once there they were fixed to stay until told to 
go home. The original Indian woman always 
squatted on the floor in preference to sitting on 
anything higher, and always stayed until she 
was told it was time to depart. She used her 
eyes a good deal, l)ut her tongue very little. 

As household help the Indian girls were 
quick to learn and ready to work, but so soon 
as they were educated to a point where they 
were useful and dressed nicely and kept clean, 
they became so attractive that they were married 
out of hand. The household helj) ])y reason of 
this was a continual succession of Indian 
Lucys, Margarets, etc., without number. 



XVIII. 
THE PIONEER MOTHER 

WITH visiting the sick, teaching the young 
and caring for her own family, the 
pioneer mother had her hands full, and of the 
fruits of her labor she saw but little. The 
life was terribly narrow, but so full of labor 
and danger that there was no time to repine. 
The coming of a white man with a white woman 
who settled in the Elokomon Valley, about 
two miles back of Cathlamet, was a great event. 
The low divide between the Columbia and 
Elokomon Rivers was covered at this time 
by a dense forest of the spruce and Douglas 
fir, and so thick was the growth that the fir 
trees would go up for 100 feet without a limb, 
and not a ray of the sun could reach the 
ground. The trees grew very tall, and one a 
short way outside the forest on the edge of a 
little prairie being measured with instruments, 
was found to be about 308 feet in height. An 
almost obliterated Indian trail went over the 
divide between the rivers, and so anxious were 
the white women to see each other that it was 

107 



108 CATHLAMET 

a very common thing for them to go over it. 
One hundred yards up the trail there was nothing 
to see but trees, and one mile in the woods was 
as far away from human help as the wilds of 
Siberia. One day when one of them with two 
of her little boys was on the trail in the midst 
of the woods a large cougar suddenly appeared 
in it not forty yards away and stood looking at 
her. Now the cougar is an uncanny beast, and 
in these Northern woods, a most formidable 
one. A man can live in the woods for j^ears 
and never see one, and yet some day the supple 
yellow panther will stand in front of him on some 
woodland path as though he had come there 
by magic. Not a footfall or sound of breaking 
twig will give any warning of his coming. He 
will simply be there, it is a trick of his, and he 
always takes the same position, calmly looking 
at you without curiosity and without fear, very 
rarely if ever crouching, and growling, if at all, in 
a gentle, sing-song drawl, more like purring than 
anything else. With low flattened head, the lit- 
tle ears drawn back, softly poised on sinewy, 
tawny legs and velvet pads, and with the long 
sweeping tail gently going from right to left and 
left to right with a quiet, steady motion, the 
cougar when he steps out of obscurity into the 
open to ol)serve man, is an imi)ressive creature. 



THE PIONEER MOTHER 109 

An armed man stops to consider a moment before 
he fires, and an unarmed man has a very lively 
desire to be somewhere else. Only in the woods 
can you see a cougar so, and it is not a pleasant 
sight for a woman with empty hands. 

There was one best thing to do, and, prompted 
by the mother's instinct, this mother did it. 
Taking one child by each hand and drawing 
them close up to her, so as to present a united 
front, she calmly looked the beast in the eyes 
and slowly and steadily moved towards him. 
She said it was the only thing that she could do. 
The grim lips curled back a little, and the white 
teeth showed; but few animals unwounded can 
face man, and, retiring step by step, the cougar 
moved back before her, and gliding into the 
brush, disappeared. An Indian woman would 
have stood in her place and gathering her chil- 
dren vuider her blanket, would have waited the 
issue in patience, and if forced into a fight, 
would have made a better one than the white 
woman; but steadily moving up into the face of 
the enemy was the English blood, and for cold- 
blooded courage when courage was necessary, 
the white woman was the superior of her red 
sister. 

This was only one of many anxieties and 
perils. With so many burdens the children had 



110 CATHLAMET 

largely to take care of themselves, and one day 
a two-year-old boy being missing, a search was 
instituted and the youngster was found floating 
in an eddy of the Columbia River, quietly cling- 
ing to a little piece of driftwood. He had fallen 
over a rocky cliff about eight feet high into the 
river, and had found a natural life-preserver in 
the tiny piece of wood just at hand. Indian 
Margaret was the nurse then, and she quietly 
stripped herself, swam out like a duck and towed 
the baby in. Except for that friendly piece of 
driftwood and Indian Margaret, this little narra- 
tive would never have been written. 

Another time of extreme anxiety was when 
the Indians had procured large supplies of liquor. 
A frightful hubbub would prevail in the Indian 
village, and as this was directly between the 
Strong and Birnie houses, it made a fearsome 
situation. The Indians, harmless enough at 
ordinary times, were liable to be dangerous Avhen 
drunk, and more than once the children were 
chased home by drunken Indians with drawn 
knives. It was perhaps a drunken joke, 
but if so, the joking was on a very serious sub- 
ject, and a white-faced little woman barring her 
doors and windows with only her small children 
within, had no enjoyment of the situation. 



XIX. 

THE RED BOX 

THE Indian War of 1855-56 brought great 
anxiety to Cathlamet. There were a few 
more white men there then, but the preponder- 
ance of the Indian was still overwhelming, and 
when it became whispered about that the Klikitat 
Chief Kamiakin, the head and front of the war, 
had messengers at Cathlamet, there was fear 
everywhere, but the native Indians stood up 
manfully for their white friends, who had helped 
them, and Mrs. Birnie and her husband held 
them with a steady hand. Here was one of 
the great advantages to the Hudson's Bay men 
of having Indian wives. No plotting could go 
on without their knowledge, and in a time of 
stress the Indian wife could always be relied 
on. No white person saw the messengers or 
knew wdio they were, but that they came was 
certain. Across the little creek in a small pasture 
stood two tali spruce trees, and at the top of 
one of these, placed on a limb trimmed off for 
the purpose, suddenly appeared a large box, 
red as blood. There it remained for months, 
111 



112 CATHLAMET 

and even years, and was said to be Kamiakin's 
signal to war, but no white man knew how it 
got there or what its message was. 

One explanation of its presence only deepens 
the mystery. If an Indian killed another he 
would, so it is claimed, procure a small box, 
paint it a brilliant red and attach it to a limb 
high upon some conspicuous tree, cutting close 
to the trunk all the limbs below it, and it is said 
that this in some strange way showed repent- 
ance for the crime and amounted to a punish- 
ment because the life of the murderer would only 
last so long as the box remained secure in its 
high }}lace. As the box was generally very se- 
curely attached the murderer's life was quite 
safe for many years, and no other Indian would 
meddle with it. This particular red box that 
appeared so mysteriously at Cathlamet in the 
time of Kamiakin's war was, it is claimed, placed 
there by a son of the Chief of the Skookum 
Tillicums (Strong People), who had murdered a 
fellow-Indian and was intended by him as a 
pu])lic confession of guilt and an expiatory sacri- 
fice. Be this as it may, the mere suggestion 
opens up many strange phases of the Indian 
character. No Indian ever openly humiliated 
himself, and if such a custom prevailed the ele- 
vation of the red box was made more in pride 



THE RED BOX 113 

than in humility. ''I have slain'' it said, and 
no ordinary Indian had much compunction in 
this or thought it lowered him in the estimation 
of his fellows. 

If the young Skookum Tillicum hoisted such 
a signal in the feverish times of a general war 
and the settlers had known that he was boasting 
of an accomplished murder it is more than likely 
that they would have taken it for granted that 
his message was, ''I have slain, I have slain. Go 
thou and do likewise," and would probably have 
promptly disposed of young Skookum Tillicum. 

This strange red box might well therefore 
have been a confession, a boast and a call to 
war all in one, and people as quick as are the 
Indians in interpreting signs would very easil}^ 
have known its deeper import, although they 
might not tell it to their white neighbors. 

The red box raised high upon the tree did not 
add any to the comfort or feeling of security of 
the few white people that lived at Cathlamet. 

From 1850 to 1862 the pioneer life of Cathlamet 
went on, the white population steadih^ increasing 
and the red as steadily diminishing. 

The order of burial of the Book of Common 
Prayer was continually in use and was read over 
man}^ lonely little graves, every trace of which 
has since ])een swept away. One of the saddest 



114 CATHLAMET 

of these l)\irials was that of Indian (leorge, a 
young Indian of sixteen. He had been a slave of 
the Tsimpseans, Northern Indians, from Fort 
Simpson, and on one of their insolent war excur- 
sions into Puget Sound Judge Strong saw him, 
and, moved with pity at his deplorable condition, 
bought him for two dollars and fifty cents 
worth of goods and brought him to Cathlamet. 
Here he grew up in the household into a strong, 
happy boy, but every now and then the wild 
instinct would come upon him and he would 
run away. Nothing would be done to reclaim 
him, and in a few weeks he w^ould return, 
ragged and thin, but very happy to get back. 
Nothing pleased him so much as to salute the 
little steamboats that used to come monthly 
from San Francisco by dipping to them a 
little home-made American flag, and when he 
lay dying of consumption his every wish was 
gratified l)y the promise that he should be 
buried shrouded in it. 



XX. 

THE END 

npHE earlier Cathlamet life was sometimes 
-*- enlivened by the visits of strangers, and 
one of these is worthy of remembrance. Half 
way between the Hudson's Bay store and the 
Strong house was a little cove in the low, rocky 
bank before which, in high tide, floated the Indian 
canoes and behind which was the Indian lodges. 
An old logging railway and cannery wharves 
now hide it almost from sight, but it was in this 
early day the principal landing place for the 
Indian village and here in times past McLoughlin, 
McDougall, McTavish and many other notables 
had landed. 

In the Fall of 1852 a canoe turned in to the 
landing from the Columbia River, and in it were 
an Indian crew and a rather short young man 
of pink and white complexion, evidently one of 
the new United States officers at Fort Vancouver. 
He was a stranger in the country and was on a 
trip to Shoalwater Bay and very anxious to get 
some white man to go on with him. He stayed 
at the Strong house for several days and so 

115 



IK) CATHLAMET 

prevailed \\\)0\\ his host that at the end of his 
visit they went off together to the bay. No 
record of this trip exists, and no official report 
of it was ever made. The Indians were reticent 
in regard to it, and all the two men vouchsafed 
to say was that they had had a jolly good time 
and would have stayed longer had the provisions 
held out. Twice again the young officer came 
to Cathlamet a welcome guest, and then his 
short stay of a year in this country being 
finished, went away to the career that time 
had in store for him, and a marvelous career 
it was, for it was written in the book of fate 
that this obscure young Captain Grant should 
command the armies of the great Republic in 
the mightiest war of modern times, that 
he should sit as a ruler of the Nation and 
should finally sleep in that great tomb that 
looks down upon the Hudson. It was fated 
that both host and guest should sleep at last at 
two Riversides far apart, one in his staiely 
toml) by the Hudson, and the other under the 
trees and grass by the dark forest he loved so 
w^ell, looking down upon the Willamette. One 
rendered a great service to his country in its 
time of need and met with cpiick and great re- 
ward; the other at the fountain head of the 
historv of a great commonwealth, after the 



THE END 117 

fashion of the pioneers, expended his life and 
strength for a coming people and gave of the best 
that was in him for future generations. 

Another visitor was a dashing young fellow 
from New York who entered into wilderness 
life with a zest. For the few years he was here 
his adventures were numberless. When as 
clerk of the court in some fiercely contested 
murder or other case he carelessly unslung his 
revolver and sat at his desk with it lying on the 
table before him, there was order in the 
court, for everybody knew what he could do 
with firearms. Only once did the wilderness 
get the advantage of him, and then he owed his 
life to the friendly service of an Indian. While 
surveying a road from Cathlamet Northward 
to the Boisfort Prairie, with the idea of extending 
it to Puget Sound, he was, when a little away 
from the party, suddenly charged upon by an 
enraged elk. Being without weapons, he dived 
for the first place of shelter at hand, which hap- 
pened to be a small fallen tree lying about two 
feet above the ground. The elk would furiously 
strike at him with hoofs and horns on one side, 
and would then jump over and strike at him 
from the other, and the only way to avoid the 
savage animal was to keep up a very alert dodg- 
ing under the tree from side to side. This game 



118 CATHLAMET 

of hide and seek went on for several hours until 
the man was nearly worn out, the elk growing 
more and more active and his eyes growing 
greener and more furious, as their manner is 
when l)alke(l, until an Indian coming up shot 
him and allowed a very tired, dirty and hum- 
bled young man to limp l)ack to camp. It was 
written for this 3'oung man that he, too, should 
serve his country in the Civil War, but that less 
fortunate than some of his comrades he should 
fall in battle at the head of his brigade, crippled 
for life by a shot through the hips. 

As a white-haired old General he now walks 
haltingly in his vineyard in California, and thinks 
often of early Oregon and of the days when "all 
the world was young." 

About the time of the great flood of 1861 came 
one of the coldest Winters ever knowm in Oregon, 
the Winter of 1861-62. Ice rarely forms at 
Cathlamet, but that Winter the water along the 
shores of the Columbia was frozen so solidh^ 
that horses and sleds were used on it, and snow 
fell and remained on the ground to the depth of 
three feet. The little steamer Multnomah, with 
genial Captain Hoyt as master, w^as frozen in at 
Cathlamet, and so were quite a number of other 
people. There is at least one staid, elderly 
woman of Portland who will rememl^er the gay 



THE END 119 

carnival of that Winter in the white and Indian 
town of Cathlamet. The Indians had plenty of 
food and clothing and were happy. The whites 
were jolly, as pioneers always were if they had 
half a chance. The six weeks of freezing weather 
was filled in with sleigh-riding, games and dancing 
and from the hills of Cathlamet to the Columbia 
River the men, boys and women, white and 
Indian, coasted continually. Food with the 
white people grew scanty, but this made no 
difference, and a fine young horse was shot for 
meat and served on the tables as roast beef. 
In the log houses and the lodges great fires 
blazed and there was nothing of sorrow or fear, 
and so we end the story, for here Cathlamet 
ceases to be Indian Cathlamet, and became 
from this time on a town of the ''Bostons." 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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